LMScast with Chris Badgett

In this LMScast episode, Brian Casel shares online coaching business tips using Clarityflow. Brian discusses Clarityflow, formerly known as ZipMessage. The Clarityflow platform was initially developed as ZipMessage, an asynchronous messaging solution. After a year in business, they decided to rename the company Clarityflow and focus on the coaching market. Brian Casel is the founder of Clarityflow, a well-known software creator, businessman, and entrepreneur with expertise in internet business and coaching. Initially, Clarityflow served as a versatile platform used for various purposes, including hiring, teaching, podcasting, remote teams, coaching, and sales teams. Brian conducted 50 interviews with coaches as part of the rebranding process to gain a deeper understanding of their needs. During this research, he discovered that coaches were not only using Clarityflow for asynchronous coaching but also for course management, group coaching, and payment processing. In response to these findings, Clarityflow added more features in 2023 to fully meet the demands of coaches. 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 Badgett. I’m the co founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to 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. It’s Brian Casel. You can find him on Twitter. He’s a cast jam. He’s got a great Twitter account. I’ve been following it for, I don’t know how long I’ve listened to Brian on his podcast bootstrap web for a long time. And he’s a awesome software creator and fellow entrepreneur, but also great at helping other entrepreneurs start and scale. Welcome to the show, Brian. Brian Casel: Hey, Chris, how’s it going? Chris Badgett: Yeah, I’m excited to get into it with you and you I’ve always enjoyed our chats. We’re just on a similar wavelength and you’ve given me a lot of good business advice. I was actually just talking with my partner, Jason Coleman, the other day about We had this a theme launchpad that we were thinking of sunsetting. And we had plans to ultimately build a new theme to go with lifter LMS. And you were like, why? Why? Get rid of a product you already have that’s functional. And it was like really good advice. And it took us a long time to get the new theme built, but, you always have your instincts are strong. So just props for that Brian Casel: Chris you, and I have connected like so many times, dude, it’s been a long time since we’ve known each other, probably like 10 years now, something like that. Yeah. And I don’t actually remember that specific conversation, but it sounds like something I probably said Chris Badgett: it was in a hot tub in Cabo. So that’s probably why Brian Casel: after several beers. Yep. Yep. Chris Badgett: But you have a, software clarity flow, which a lot of this, you out there watching or listening if you’re into coaching and this whole challenge of. Relationships like coaching, isn’t just content, it’s conversation. And so that’s it. Clarity flow. com. And then your content side and coaching yourself is an instrumental products. com. But let’s talk about clarity. That’s your new thing. Let’s talk about ClarityFlow first. What problem do you solve there? And I know you solve several, but what, was the seed of the idea for ClarityFlow? Yeah. Brian Casel: ClarityFlow really evolved a lot. Like it was, it’s been really different. So I’ve been running ClarityFlow for, now three full years now. And it started as a different name. It started under the name ZipMessage. And almost a year ago like at the beginning of this year in 2023, we rebranded from zip message to clarity flow. But starting from 6 months before, so middle of 2022 was when we did a big really I did, but I have a small team working with me, but I, did a lot of research with our customers and we dialed into coaches. So early on when it was zip message, it was really just this like asynchronous. Messaging tool that was used just really broadly in a bunch of different ways, right? Like we saw coaches using it. We saw remote teams using it, we saw sales teams, we saw podcasters using it for async stuff. We saw hiring use cases, teaching and all, this different stuff. And, then really became clear in our second year, like in 2021, that or as we got into 2022, that we really do need to set up sort of niche down and figure out who we are building for and who we’re serving best. And Through a couple of early customer research conversations, it became clear that, like, all right, the segment who are using it for coaching, they are by far our best customer because they rely on it the most. They use it most in the core of their business, whereas the other use cases, they got some value from it, but it was periphery. It was like they could easily pick it up, put it down, swap it out. It’s not a big deal in their business, but for coaches, it was like the way that they actually communicate with their clients. So that became clear. And then I did 50 more customer research interviews with coaches to really understand. Where does this actually fit in your stack? And through those interviews, I learned it’s yes, they use it for asynchronous coaching, like asynchronous sending and receiving messages, camera and audio only messages with their clients and texts. But they. But so many coaches also have a course or also have a coaching group, and they do a lot of group cohorts and they try to duct tape our tool against so many other different tools. And then, of course, there’s payments, right? Selling your coaching packages, selling access to your coaching groups and cohorts and things. So through that, through all that research, I realized okay, we should really build a cohesive. Platform for a coach to build all those pieces together under 1 group. Actually, this month in December next week, we are launching clarity flow commerce, which is our payments feature. And so that sort of caps off this whole year where, we went from just being an async communications tool, that’s still the core of what we are. But we’ve added on the ability to run courses, the ability to have community spaces, and now finally the ability to actually excel and integrate your Stripe account and do all that. So, it’s so this year, like this month, we actually finished that big roadmap of becoming the full product vision for ClarityFlow. Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. I know there’s this business advice, like you should put your customer at the center of your product, not your business or not your product. And that’s like a well executed okay, we’ve got this coach avatar. What do they need? What do people want? They want one tool to rule them all. Like they don’t want a million different things to duct tape Brian Casel: together. I think it depends on the tool. I think not every tool has to be everything. But I think in my case, like hearing enough. Use cases are enough stories from coaches who are trying to do that, like duct tape thing. And we have a really good Zapier integration. You could do certain integrations, but in our case, it became clear that it’s still, that doesn’t solve the problem because they’re, because the client, like the coach’s client, they don’t want to have to deal with like multiple logins to different tools and jumping between like, all right, I paid my coach over here. Then I’m joining the coaching group community over on this platform. I’m getting the courses and the library frameworks over there. And then I’m communicating over here. That’s three, four different tools. They, want a cohesive experience for their clients. So that’s. That’s what we put Chris Badgett: together. I ended up in a similar place with Lifter LMS. I built, I was really into courses and the technology and, then like over time, it’s taken me a long time to figure out the avatar and there’s actually several and WordPress makes it challenging because people, it’s so componentized, people do all kinds of stuff with it. But if you were advising a, new starting entrepreneur. Brian Casel: What’s Chris Badgett: there’s like it’s there’s the advice that you should always focus on the avatar But is there like what would you advise which way like if you’re really into a certain technology or niche? Should you just go for it and figure out the avatar later or from day one? Pick one and double down because the benefit of not picking one is over time It just emerges or a couple of them emerge and you get that, time just seeing what happens so that your assumptions can be challenged in the market will tell you. So sometimes it’s like different strategies Brian Casel: there. I this, idea of niching down is, one of those business lessons that I, keep having to learn over and over again, the hard way. Like zip message was not my first business. And for, whatever reason, I thought it, it would work by not niching down and just keeping it. Broad and it worked in the first year, but then, it became really clear in the second year. And look it’s, different for every business there, there, are multiple, there’s so many different ways to be successful. You really have to just go with whatever. Make sense to you as the founder and whatever situation you have, but I know that’s a cop out. I’ll give you like, in my experience, what I found was yes we could find some customers by not niching down and just being like, yeah, we work for that. And we work for that. We work for that. And on our marketing site, we had At one point we had something like six or seven different pages, like one that spoke to coaches, one that spoke to sales teams, one that spoke to everything. It eventually became easier in so many different ways to focus in on our ideal customer, the coach. Number one, like the obvious ones are like marketing, right? So like the, website speaks to coaches, every headline that we write, every text, every email we’re speaking to a coach and we can speak directly to what they care about. So you’re not watering down your messaging. But I think to me what, became a lot more interesting is the, on the product side We went from being from not really having a clear direction on what we should build next. What features are most important to build next? Because again, we were serving so many different use cases and it even eliminated a lot of interesting features from us being able to build them because it’s like, it’s too specific. Only a few people. Might use that, this or that feature. And I actually remember in the early, in the first year or two of zip message, I was, it was pretty haphazard in terms of choosing which features we build next. It was like what sounds fun, Or maybe a couple of people asked for this. They happened to ask for it this month. All right, let’s build it this month. But then once I got into coaches and I got really, into the research on how exactly they use these different tools and coaches use. Course tools and community tools in very different ways than a typical like online teacher uses them or even like these large communities like when using it for coaching. It’s very, specific. It’s more like a library of resources that they like hand pick and they give to their. To their clients and things and they want these like close, small membership coaching cohorts so I learned all those little details. And then I, and then it became clear, like, all right, this feature is really important to coaches. Let’s do that first. And then this feature is really important to round out that stack for a coach and finish out that use case that comes next. And then the payments piece like comes after that, like this whole year of 2023 has Elevate Your Online Coaching Business with Clarity Flow: been Brian Casel: a very clear Sequence of features to, to get from like half built to like fully built product feature complete and it, just, every single feature became obvious, like, all right, this is what comes next Chris Badgett: the coaching industry. And I’m thinking particularly, I guess about business coaching has evolved and it’s not going away. Like it just continues to. Proliferate as a way to learn just in time, education, network with your peers and all these like coaching niches, I think of Tony Robbins is the first business coach in a way. And he’s been around since I don’t know, I was a kid and late night tv commercials, life coaching and stuff like that. Brian Casel: Yeah it was, it’s been eye opening for me. I, I’ve never personally been yeah. That connected to coaching in general I know many coaches and I, right now I work with a coach, but I, and I’ve different coaches over the years, but not, all the time. And again, once I got into the research into this it, was pretty eye opening to see, like, how large this category really is. Because, yeah, like you were saying I’m familiar with business coaches. But it goes so far beyond that as it’s we see customers using clarity flow who are, we do get a lot of business coaches, but even within that, you’ve got like sales coaches, you’ve got executive coaches, you’ve got marketing coaches, product coaches. And then we see life coaches. We see nutrition coaches, health and fitness. We see spirituality. And we, see a lot of music teachers using us. We see a lot of speech and language coaches. I’ve seen like pet training coaches parenting coaches, like relationships like that. There’s all these different areas where people hit like person to person, one person helping the other. It’s like an age. It’s, been around for centuries. But what, and then there’s like different styles of coaching and the ones that really resonate with clarity flow tend to be the coaches who are, they probably do some one to one coaching, but they are looking to start to scale. And to do that, they do it in one of two ways. One is they form, they get into more group coaching and usually in a form of like cohorts where it’s like, they’ll do a spring cohort and a summer cohort and a fall. And they’re moving to more asynchronous coaching, meaning. Instead of booking a lot of live 1 to 1 calls on your calendar you can still have face to face, like deep level coaching with video or audio only spoken or, text, but you can go back and forth on your own time. And then when you combine that with groups, like that also opens the door to like. Coaches in Australia working with clients in America or Europe and Asia and like getting across time zones. When you take the live scheduling piece out of it, really opens up a lot of possibilities for a coach to scale their business and kind of take back a lot of their time yeah, Chris Badgett: I know there’s all these niches and they do it a little differently, but if you were to put together a great coaching package, what would be the elements? Like what’s in the box when somebody buys. A coaching page, a package that’s well designed. Brian Casel: Yeah. We see a lot of different options. There’s, still the option to just do a straight like subscription, which is probably the most common way is like you some, flat monthly price. Gives you sometimes they include live coaches, coaching, and sometimes they don’t, right? And, they just do asynchronous. Sometimes they offer both options. We have some coaches who like limit the number of asynchronous messaging every, month. And you can do that with clarity flow, but. I find that it’s just easy, enough to say like X dollars a month. Unlimited. You have unlimited async access and the reality that, that might seem scary to offer unlimited access, but the reality is you can structure it so that a, like every request you only guarantee a response time of like. Say 2 up to 2 business days or something like that. Asynchronous is not live. So it’s not like you have to be standing by the line and answer a call when it comes in. It just hits. You just have an inbox and then you can work your way through that inbox. At a time that, that makes sense. Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And tell me more about like with ClarityFlow, there’s conversations, coaching programs, interactive courses, group spaces you’ve got the payments coming. What’s. Like you have the unlimited access as an example, but what else what do you do with all the old recordings? How do you organize it? What do you save? What do you not save? How do you automate? Like you could have a reuse, like a welcome to the program message that goes out. That’s a big Brian Casel: one. It’s like we, give you this thing we call the library. So you can build your library of template. Messages. Chris Badgett: And so besides a welcome message, what’s what’s in the library? Brian Casel: So like answers to common questions. Okay. So a coach’s client if, say it’s a business coach, they probably get the question of like, how should I price my product? And they’ve probably answered that with some go-to strategies, like hundreds of times, right? They could create a five minute video that gives their best response to how to price a particular type of product that goes into their library. How to make my first hire that goes into their library, how to I don’t know, get a virtual assistant or, yeah get a VA Hey, I’ve answered this question like 20 times. Let’s take that last one and turn it into a template. And so that’s like getting even back to like, courses, like a lot of, coaches would sign up for a course software to. Not necessarily deliver a course like lesson 1 lesson 2 lesson 3, but just to have a place to store all this content and then they can like, hand pick and select and say hey this coaching client is a little bit beginner. Let’s. Let’s curate a couple of pieces of content and strategies for that person. Or this client is more advanced. I’m going to go to my more advanced content in my library and give it to that person so that, that’s a big part of what, people do with, clarity flow. Yeah, that’s Chris Badgett: huge. The best coaching things I’ve been around, there’s. The coach is like prescribing, and if they have this giant overwhelming vault they make it easy. You can find it on your own, or maybe they’re like, Hey, you should really look at, you need to focus on this piece, this needle in the haystack. Basically I’m thinking of people like Dan Martell or James Schramko. They have these big libraries of public content, but also in their programs. Yeah. Brian Casel: But I think that also that it’s, they’re still coaches that they’re still giving personalized advice or personalized responses back to the person. So it might start with a template message about your go to VA hiring strategy. But then the person’s going to have Oh, but in my case I’ve got something that’s a little bit different. I have a question or. How should I actually apply that given my personal scenario? And that’s where a coach is actually offering coaching. And so the the whole idea, like we went from asynchronous conversations that are laid out in like a threaded conversation layout. But now, that’s still the core. And, you can insert these templates and reply back with personalized. replies all in the same flow. And that’s, been like Chris Badgett: the concept. Yeah. Which helps the coach, not quote waste time on the low value entry stuff. And then when the custom piece comes in, it saves everybody’s time. Brian Casel: Exactly. And also there’s a lot of code like, I work with a coach, I meet with them. Live on a call once every 2 weeks, but in between our live calls, we have an asynchronous thread going in clarity flow and the way we usually use that is I’ll send them a message a couple of days before our live call that’s coming up and say Hey, here are the couple of things that are on my mind right now. Just to give you some groundwork, some context that we don’t have to waste the first 20 minutes of our call doing that. It’s once we get on the live we can just jump right in I Chris Badgett: love that. Just because we always have to ask how should coaches use a artificial intelligence or can they, or do you have any tips there or what you’re seeing in the industry right now? To create even more like speed or Brian Casel: quality or whatever it’s, interesting again, like I hear from a lot of coaches every day and I have not heard it’s not like a high demand high feature request thing. Oh, I wish this could be done with AI. Or I wanna use AI in this way. So it’s, so I would say so far we’re still, at least in this, in, in my corner of the coaching industry, it’s still not a thing yet. I’m, sure people use chat GPT and stuff, but like they’re not, they don’t wish it’s part of a coaching product. We certainly have ideas on how we might integrate AI in, in the future. I know that there’s a lot of people who tend to use chat g or, talk about how that they use chat GBT to like. Think through ideas and frameworks honestly, I don’t know, like, how if, it really comes into play in the interaction between a coach and their client, I think most people are using AI privately to help, them help in their own creative process or, their own production flow. That’s how I generally, I mostly use it for coding cause I work on the product. So I, I use it a lot in software development stuff. Occasionally we use it to help write some like marketing copy and things like that, or at least get like a version one of that written. But in, in clarity flow there at some point, probably next year, we’ll get into things like, because what we already do is we transcribe. So if you send a video message or an audio message, we’ll automatically transcribe it and put the text there. An obvious 1 is we should use AI to summarize that and give you a couple of bullet points so that you don’t have to read the whole thing or listen back. Another thing that we do is every message gets a title, which you can customize. We should be able to use AI to automatically title your messages so little, and I think in general, like software tools should, just try to sprinkle AI in, in these things. It, doesn’t have to replace how the thing gets used because at the end of the day, most tools are still used by humans, Chris Badgett: I can see, I like your point about just using it in your own brainstorming. Like I could see a coaching client being like, okay, I just signed up for SAS coaching with this person. What should I ask them or whatever? Like just to get the brainstorm, get the juices flowing. Yeah, for sure. Yep. You mentioned you code. One of the things that’s always impressed me about you is you’re what I would call a unicorn. You can market, you can sell, you can design, you’re good at product, you can write code, you’re good with team members like you do it all. Brian Casel: Yeah, I would question on the marketing side. I think I’ve had some marketing wins over the years and some product business wins. But I always feel stronger on the product side and I think of product is like that includes talking to customers. And then mapping the customer needs to designing a feature and an interface that makes sense that’s, where I like to, that’s literally where I spend most of my time. Chris Badgett: There’s that saying that the best marketing is a good product. So I think so. Yeah. Or, and there’s, also the other one is advertising is the price you pay for not having a great product or something. Cool. Let’s talk about on the instrumental product side, like who is your ideal person that you want to help? Brian Casel: Yeah. So this is new we’re, this is live, but we’re recording this in December of 2023. And so this month I’m starting, I’m just, getting the wheels turning on this new business. So this is like separate from clarity flow continues to run. I’ve got a small team and I still work on that, but yeah, I want to start up something new in 2024 and, I’m calling it instrumental products. I’m thinking of it like a media brand, like a media company. It’ll mostly be me. I’m going to be focusing a lot on, creating a lot of YouTube content. But it’s mainly about around product strategy. Like I was just saying I like to spend most of my time thinking and working and building things on the product side and I did go through this transformation about this was back in 2017, 2018, where before in all the years before that, I was really just a designer and a marketer and I couldn’t build. Software products full stack. I always relied on outsourcing and hiring developers and or just doing like services and not being able to do full software products. But then I learned how to code. I learned Ruby on rails. I learned the full stack being able to take any idea or meet any market need and build and ship something. And. Yeah. Now we’re like, 6 years later I’ve really leveled up my skills a lot on that because that’s all I’ve been doing for the last 6 years is building software products. And I would like to get back into teaching and content and coaching and I’ve started doing this a little bit through instrumental products. Where I’m helping people transition to a products business, and that could be learning how to code and ship your own software, SAS idea, or WordPress plugin idea, or whatever it might be. Or it could be working with you and your co founders or small team to like. Get transitioning or shipping your your, 1st product and kind of transition into that. Again it’s, just starting up now. I’m getting like, the content engines going. I’m starting to do a bit of coaching with, some product folks and. And I’m learning right now on, like, how to really niche this down, but my, current thought is helping you build and ship a product and, expand your skill set to be able to do that. Yeah, it’s fun. I’m exploring right now, but I’m pretty excited about it. Chris Badgett: I came into product from the agency side and it was really challenging. It was really hard. I had partners it was really tough. And, but I hear that a lot from people, particularly in my circles in the WordPress community who build websites for clients and they want to get into product. Given where you’re at now with all your experience and everything, what is like the first couple of things, if somebody has that desire, like I really want to get into product, like where, do we start heading so that we don’t end up wasting lots of time and money and increase our chances of success? Brian Casel: Yeah. I, definitely went from one of the things that drove my interest in this back in 2018 was that before that I was totally, if I wanted to get into any sort of software product business, I was totally reliant on outsourcing the development and that meant a few things, which I learned the really hard way. Like I had a SAS attempt at that back in 2017, where I spent. Upwards of 50, maybe more thousand dollars over the course of a year or 2, just hiring back end developers to take my designs and my product ideas, bring them to life. So not only spending a ton of money and. Unless you have investors if you’re bootstrapping, like I was like that, could be pretty draining. But then it’s also not really understanding how everything comes together. And I’m, a designer first, but I build and, ship products full stack. And I’ve come to a point now where I really see design as everything from designing how the database is architected to how different. Services in the code work together how, the interface comes together, how users use it. It’s, all you’re designing a product from, the inside it out and, I made so many product mistakes early on before I learned the full stack, not only cost me money, but made a much worse product because I did not understand why certain technical decisions were being made it’s, made me collaborate so much. I have a team of, two or three developers where we collaborate on such a deep level that I wouldn’t have been able to do before, had I not known, the language. So that’s been a huge one for me. And then just gaining the ability to build and ship literally anything. Like at this point there’s, this sense of of course I haven’t built everything, but like any idea that comes along, I know how to learn, how to build that. I, know the, path to figuring this out and man now with ai, like I can’t believe I. Spent these years in 1819 learning how to code and AI was not even a thing back then. I wish it was like AI makes it so much easier now. So it’s, pretty exciting, but what it does, I think for, most people who transition into this is Completely opens up your world in terms of the potential ideas and the potential businesses that you can transition into. Like it doesn’t have to be selling your time as a freelancer. Could be a way out of having a job full time. Of course, those things take a really long time to transition out of, but it definitely opens a lot of possibilities Chris Badgett: Yes, that is really amazing about your broad skill set, but I love how you put design at the center. And I think there’s a real, it’s our world runs on design, whether you realize it or not, everything is designed. I remember going to Barnes and Noble once and being like, Oh, I want to find a book on design. I want to level up my being a product person design, I couldn’t really find anything. And I went to Amazon. I wasn’t really sure what I could find the best stuff that was relevant to my industry. It seems like there’s, it’s so important yet. There’s. A gap or it’s like really narrow Oh we’re just going to focus on interface design and, but what there’s not, I don’t know. There’s, it just seems like there’s this big gap in the market. Even like at the book level for somebody who wants to get into product design, let’s say at the software level. There’s that book. Don’t make me think it’s really old. It’s good. Yeah. Like what other resources would you throw out there for somebody wanting to level up on product, particularly around design? Brian Casel: The, for me, it’s always been just go build stuff, get into projects and do it. There’s, probably technical books out there that you can, I’ve never been a learner of technical concepts using books. Usually because a, the things move so quickly that they’re so you’re not up on the latest stuff. You should still, I think, generally choose things that are a little bit older and more mature. Don’t, just go straight to like the cutting edge, most trendy tech stacks and languages and things. I, I chose Ruby on rails because it’s like old and boring and huge and well established. But but yeah, like books are also like. Yeah. This is the other thing that I learned as, someone who learned how to code for the purpose of shipping products. It’s a very different thing. If you are, learning for the purpose of getting hired as a developer and maybe getting your first job as a junior developer or trying to go work at Google or something or, level up your career as a, as an employed web developer software engineer, that’s a totally different thing. Like you, you need to learn. All the details and be able to but in my world I’ve only ever been interested in learning how to build so that I can ship a product as quickly and efficiently as possible. And that means I don’t want to learn the whole book on JavaScript. I just want to learn the little bits that are going to help me build this interface so that I can ship it. And there’s a lot of necessary shortcuts that you need to take. It can be really confusing in the early days to know what is actually important to spend time understanding and learn. What’s. What else can I just learn the surface level and get the gist, but I don’t have to go deep because it’s not going to get me there faster. That’s that over time. You get better and better at learning those like shortcuts through the learning stuff that so and that’s where projects come into play. Yes, you probably need to take some courses like a 101 course at the beginning. There’s a lot of online learning materials out there. I also. Got a lot of benefit from working with coaches or in my first year of learning, like other experienced Ruby on Rails developers coaching me on like, when I get stuck, they can answer my questions, but the most important learning thing was taking that base knowledge that I gained through courses and some coaching and getting into practice throwaway projects. And then eventually the sooner you can get to building and shipping your very first real project. That’s where you’re going to learn, like, all right, this is where I’m getting stuck and this is what’s going to get me to the finish line. And you’re going to learn that again and again. Learn by doing that’s, the best thing. Chris Badgett: What, would you say to a non technical founder who really wants to get into like software as an example on the decision of should I really try to be full stack or find a technical co founder? Yeah generic advice at that, crucial decision point. Brian Casel: I feel like there’s never really any generic advice for anything. Yeah. It’s totally personal for each individual person. Some people are just naturally drawn to it. I, feel like in my case. My mind worked logically, like a programmer, probably for 10 years before I even learned how to program but I, just didn’t know how to put the pieces together. So I was a front end developer and I had worked a lot with processes with. People and teams and stuff, but I never learned how to build and ship code. So I, guess in that sense, it came easy to me, but I think that there’s a lot of entrepreneurs who are like that, who, who are, who have a systems mindset. If you think in processes like, when you scale your team and your operations. It’s not all that different. It’s when this happens, we do this. When this happens, we do that. If this, then that it’s, a lot of that there’s more technical stuff to it, but you can learn it. It’s not that difficult. I think with I think that for non technical co founders, if you do have a technical founder, it’s also really, important for that technical founder to be able to speak the language of business. And, because you can’t just trust that a totally technical person is going to make all the right business decisions when it comes to deciding how to implement something, how to code something, how to architect a database. If we built it this way, what is it going to mean next year when we need to move the feature in that direction to reach this customer group? Or can we trim the scope in this or that way to ship this? This quarter instead of three quarters from now. There’s a lot of that, kind of like decision making. And I think if the, I think it’s like a technical founder and a non technical founder need to meet each other in the middle, like the non technical needs to care about marketing. The non technical found, of course they need to do the sales and marketing, but like they also need to learn enough about the technical side to be able to speak to the technical person and make informed decisions. They can’t just trust that it’s because what ends up happening is the non technical founder gets frustrated with like, how long are things taking? Why are things taking long? can’t we ship this? Doesn’t it work in the way that I thought it would work? You got it, got to get it into the weeds to understand that stuff. Maybe you’re not the one actually writing code, but like you got to understand how things were architected. Chris Badgett: Let’s say there’s a coach or a course creator out there and they’re, super niche and they’re like, you know what? I want to add more value in addition to courses and coaching. I think I want to build like a software for my people. How do you have any quick thoughts on that to do it on, do a WordPress solution versus a SAS solution? What are, what’s, what are some things that people aren’t thinking about if they’re new to the idea of which way should I go? Brian Casel: In terms of choosing which tools to be able to build a product. Chris Badgett: Yeah. Yeah. If somebody has an idea and they’re like, I want to help house cleaners run their business more successfully. As an example, I’m just thinking about one of our customers. Brian Casel: I would, yeah, I would go with whatever tools, whatever platform the best and you are most comfortable building and shipping. And if, that’s WordPress, then do it in WordPress. If it’s not, then go, with something else. But at the end of the day, like the underlying platform doesn’t matter all that much that what, what matters. Like when I started to learn how to code, I was deciding between first, like the whole world of, languages which one should I learn? And then I zeroed in on like, all right, it’s either going to be Ruby on Rails. Or laravel PHP based Laravel and both of them are really popular. Both of them are really or somewhat old. They’ve been around several years. They’re through several versions now. So they’re not like cutting edge and brand new. The other factor that I looked at was like, they’re so popular. That there is so many resources available in these ecosystems to, learn, to use smaller libraries and plugins and products in these ecosystems for rails or Laravel. There’s a lot of courses, there’s a lot of coaches. And then the, last thing that I looked at was like, there’s a huge worldwide developer pool of people that I could potentially hire if you get like the most niche. Cutting edge technology is gonna be very few developers available to hire for that because they don’t know it yet. But there’s a ton of ruby on rails developers and there are a ton of PHP developers in the world. That made it a lot easier to eventually yes, at first, it was more about me learning and building myself. But very quickly, like within a year or two after that, I got into shipping real SAS products where I did need to bring in the help of other developers. And I’ve been working with this group for the last five years. And, then just being able to like collaborate with developers in this ecosystem. That’s been huge. So that’s what I would look at in terms of choosing which one to learn. But in terms of I have a product idea ship, I want to ship it within the next three, four months. Just go with whatever best Chris Badgett: let’s use the the house cleaning example. If we were going to build a software there, and on level 1, you would just communicate to a developer that says something like, I want a house cleaning software that does this, and this, but design 1 of your strengths is like a much. It’s a powerful communication tool. Writing is important too, but how does somebody get into visual communication? Like for you when you’re designing do you start like on paper, then you go to Figma or something like that? Or do you build like a, fake PowerPoint? mockups or, how does somebody get into that way of thinking and communicating visually and thinking about user experience? Brian Casel: Yeah. That’s the key word is user experience. It’s, so much less about the colors and the styling and the fonts. That stuff is important to it. Like you don’t want it, like it should have a cohesive visual look and feel, but that. That gets figured out very early on, like from the branding. And then once you have a basic style guide to work with, like that basically defines your three or four colors and, stuff like that. Eventually you get better at like fonts and spacing and that stuff is just surf surface level, like visual look and feel. When I think about design for a product, I’m thinking about. I start with what does the user need to I, very much like this concept of job to be done. And that’s how I structure a lot of my customer research interviews is, understanding their job to be done. Like, why are they hiring this product? What’s the outcome that they need to get from it? And in many cases in the case in clarity flow, it’s a product that they’re going to. Probably open up and log in and use on a day to day basis. So I, got to understand what is their like daily workflow? And where do they need to get too fast? What do they need to use a lot? What, are they not going to be using very much? We could tuck those away and like settings panels and stuff. But mostly it’s like, what’s the fastest way between point a and point B. They want to do this. , they want to send this message. They want to be able to configure these options and send it off. Let’s help them do that in a seamless way. The, other thing that’s frustrating, but it’s a. It’s part of the process is I, might have after I do a customer research interview and I design and I. I know conceptually what the feature needs to be and what it needs to do. I could design it and build it and ship it with, whatever concept and layout and user interface that I think makes the most sense to me, but so many times I ship it and then I get feedback from users. Who are confused or they can’t find the button that I think is pretty obvious, but they don’t see it. Or or they actually end up working in a different sequence than I thought they, they would in their workflow. You just can’t understand that stuff until you put it in the hands of, customers. So I’m a big believer in yeah do, your best to ship something of high quality, but. Sooner, the better, get it out the door as quickly as humanly possible because, and it’s not done once you ship it once you ship it now, you can learn and now you can iterate and improve it and, all that. Even this week we’re about to launch this big commerce feature. It’s one of the biggest features that we’ve built so far. We’ve been working on it for probably almost three months now. But we’re at the end, we’re at the final testing and I’m telling my team like, all right, we got to test it of course, but we’re, it’s going live next week. Like they’re going to be things that are not going to be finished or not, or might break, but we’re going to fix those afterward. We need to just get it out the door and get it in the hands of users. And then and then go from there. Chris Badgett: Last quick question just for the course creators out there. Interactive courses is a feature of ClarityFlow. What does that mean? Or if somebody’s really just thinking about content and making videos for their courses, how can they make it more interactive? Brian Casel: Yeah. Again we, take the angle of this is for coaches and, their clients. So a lot of times a coach’s form of a course is like an inter interactive thing where, they’ll send like one message to their client or one course lesson, if you will, to their client. And then you want to have a workflow that says once the client presses play on that, then trigger the next one. Or once they press play, trigger the next one a week later. Or you can do things like if the client has not pressed play automatically send a email 3 days later to nudge them to say, hey, you haven’t watched this yet. And then the other way you can do it is if the client presses play, or if the client posts a reply, then automatically post a reply back to them after that. So you can set up these question answer call response time delayed sequences. We, call them workflows that you can build into your conversations and into your into your courses and clarity flow. That’s essentially what it is. Chris Badgett: Awesome. That’s Brian. I could talk to you for another hour, but we’re, up on our hour here. So go check out clarity flow. That’s a clarity flow. com. If you want to learn or work directly with Brian, check out instrumental products. com. And you can also put them in your earbuds like me and listen to bootstrapped web. It’s a great podcast. If you enjoyed this conversation, you’ll really enjoy bootstrapped web as well. Is there any other final words for the folks listening out there, Brian? Brian Casel: Yeah, Chris, this was fun. I was always good to catch up with you. And I’m always a fan of what, you guys are doing over there at lifter. Yeah, keep doing it. I can’t believe like you’ve been doing this podcast forever. I like to Chris Badgett: say I started this podcast at the same time as Tim Ferriss. He’s just a lot better known than me. So literally 10 years. Brian Casel: Wow. Incredible. That is like super impressive to, and you’ve been like, have you even missed a week on this thing? Chris Badgett: Maybe here or there, but not really. Yeah thanks for coming on, Brian. I really appreciate it. Go check out also Brian on Twitter. That’s at Cass jam, and I hope you have a great rest of your day. 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 at LifterLMS. Go to lifterlms. com forward slash 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 Elevate Your Online Coaching Business with Clarityflow appeared first on LMScast.

In this LMScast episode, Rytis Lauris shares about how to increase Course and membership sales with Omnisend. Rytis provides information about Omnisend, a comprehensive e-commerce marketing solution. Rytis Lauris the co-founder and CEO of Omnisend, all in one e commerce marketing. He provides insights into OmniSend’s functionality, integration potential with platforms like WooCommerce and WordPress LMS solutions such as LifterLMS, LearnDash all the LMS that integrate through WP Fusion, which has a great integration with Omnisend as well. Rytis describes the growth of OmniSend during its 10-year history, stressing the recent emphasis on actively contributing to the WordPress environment and developing integrations. When it comes to the WordPress community, Rytis is grateful for the sense of belonging and cooperation that exists there, pointing out that it is a more welcoming and encouraging atmosphere than other ecosystems like Shopify. The discussion dives into OmniSend’s pricing approach, highlighting flexibility and affordability, particularly for small and medium enterprises. OmniSend makes it possible for organizations to begin with a free plan that includes all services and then upgrade to premium plans as they expand. 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 Badgett. I’m the co founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to 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. His name is Rytis Lauris. He’s from OmniSend. com, which is all in one e commerce marketing. Welcome to the show, Rytis. Rytis Lauris: Hey, Chris. Thanks for inviting me. Great to be here. I’m excited Chris Badgett: to get into it with you today. We’re going to talk about some of my favorite topics and things this audience loves, which is selling marketing, digital courses, coaching communities. Tell us at a high level, how OmniSend sits in the space. As a marketing automation and e commerce solution, Rytis Lauris: so basically we have built what’s what is behind this marketing automation. So there are channels as email SMS, text messages, and what push notifications. So basically, we help anyone who runs. Digital business, especially if you, if the ones who sell online, we help to communicate with the existing customer base. So usually what, do we see that that initial transaction and initial sale anyone who runs a business makes is, really a right negative. You lose money because you pay for, Google, you pay for Meta, Facebook, Instagram, whatever more than, they actually earn from a first from a first transaction on the, from a first purchase. So that’s why it’s very important to communicate with your customers and invite them to, retain to, make a repeated purchase. And that’s how you convert your customers into, profitable customers. And that’s how you ensure lifetime value. ROI positive. So yeah, so that’s where OmniSend really helps customers to communicate with those from whom you have a subscription, from whom you have an opt in and agreement and, or ask to communicate by from, a brand. So emails, SMS and, push notifications, you can both automate with us, or you can send both campaigns as well. Chris Badgett: Awesome. And OmniSend works with WooCommerce. You can use it today with WordPress LMS solutions like LifterLMS, LearnDash all the LMSs that integrate through WP Fusion, which has a great integration with OmniSend as well. Tell us a little bit. About the backstory of OmniSend as it’s 10 years old. Rytis Lauris: Yeah it’s, going to turn 10 years next year as you will. So really we had to from LifterLMS and not yourself, Chris, personally. But yeah yeah, so we started back in the days that was a spinoff from a digital marketing agency and some of our customers were selling online and that’s how we saw that those who sell online, they have a unique capabilities to really automate marketing more and then make marketing more targeted and more relevant for their customers. And it’s because all because of entire customer journey is basically happening online. So we can have a lot of data based on which you can automate. You can automate your marketing activities. So that’s how we launched a product 10 years ago. It took us two years to, to start earning something from that product. So we saw the good initial traction, but nobody was willing to pay for it. And then they look back to the product and understand why it was just really, MVP version very, basic product back in the day. So it was email only. Yeah. So since then we, we focus on serving online businesses and those who sell online. And and yeah, so for, the vast majority of the years, we’re mainly focusing on, other e commerce platforms outside, outside the WordPress. For a few years, we have integration with WooCommerce and but we did not invest too much to be honest. So if someone had any experience with OmniSend like three or four years ago could be potentially that, that was not the best experience back in the days because it was not a priority for us. But at the same time, we start seeing really organic, great organic traction coming from, WordPress. Customers and then agencies. And then, we saw that we create value for, those customers as well. So we really improved our integration, direct integration WP fusion, et cetera. And then we are building other direct integrations with other service providers within the ecosystem to ensure the best experience for our customers. For online stores for, online creators who sell online. And yeah, so basically that’s we’re relatively new actively, relatively new in the ecosystem, but we’re really looking forward to, to contribute, to invest and to, create value for those who sell online. Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. I love saying Brands come into the WordPress space who’ve been around for a while and are looking to engage with the WordPress community. How do you find the WordPress community? What’s it like compared to some of the other ecosystems you’ve operated in? Rytis Lauris: Yeah, in other ecosystems, we are maybe it’s not a secret. Maybe I can mention the name and Shopify. We are we are number 2 marketing automation solution. And so we have a quiet good, share there. And WordPress is different and I like it way more, to be honest it’s, really community. There is a sense of community here and and and there is a lot of partnership here. Even the competitors, we they have this frenemies relationship, which I admire a lot, that basically you can cooperate even with your direct competitors. The market is big and you can still, there is still a lot of room to, to grow the market size, to grow the, size of a pie. And and then if the pie is bigger, there is enough space for everyone to, to get your own piece of that pie, your own steak. So I really find it. And we as a company, you find it very, friendly and very supporting. And to be honest coming to the first WordCamp. That was like you are new here, like feeling I don’t know, maybe as a student coming into the campus for the first time but we found it like extremely welcoming and I’m really happy that we are becoming more and more active here. That’s Chris Badgett: awesome. I’ve been checking out your website for you out there listening or watching, go to omni send. com. One of the things that stands out to me is your pricing and how reasonable it is and how adjustable it is based on your list size. There’s I’ve been in other marketing automation tools and there’s like these big jumps from one I’m in right now is going from 25, 000 to 50, 000 email list size and. Even though I’m around 28, 000 actives, I’m paying the 50, 000 price and it’s, it is quite a bit more than OmniSend. And I think it’s really cool what you’ve done, like your pricing. We don’t have to mention certain dollar amounts cause I know pricing changes over time, but this seems really approachable. And the other thing I noticed is. Some, softwares have this mindset of, Oh, just go up market, just go up market and go enterprise. That’s where the money’s at. But you have, you’ve got a great free plan and your plans at smaller list sizes are very affordable, which in the LMS industry, not everybody launches a digital course or coaching program and gets like thousands of people on their first day. They might, it might take a while to get 20 people, 50 people, a hundred people. And they, try to keep their costs down as they grow and just have a fair price as their business scales. And I, this is the most attractive pricing ramp I’ve seen that, that makes sense and is affordable all the way. Can you tell, us. Like how you think about pricing or freemium in for omni Rytis Lauris: Vancouver. So really, great that you slighted this as this is one of the key value propositions of, Omni and since we’re beginning the, one thing which have not changed, so yeah. Our focus to, online businesses. And the second thing is serving SMB. So I would say at the very beginning, we were, we’re serving like micro to small businesses. Now product has improved and now we can serve all the way to really truly midsize businesses, but we are not aiming to serve any corporate kind of customers, enterprise level. So that’s where we stick. And this is why it is important. Two things to create very. easy to use product and to, have a low like learning curve as flat as possible. So basically that’s how we think about the, product development, but it has to be the first layer. It has to be super easy to start using and gaining value. So there are a lot of prebuilt templates not only visual templates as for email, but segment templates automation templates, like best use cases up rebuilt into. into the product. And second layer is that you can, there is an advanced layer. So you can customize, you can have a blank canvas if you wish. And the third layer that you can, if you can even customize even more. So this is an API layer. Similar, we think about pricing as well. That we start serving all the way from micro businesses, so it has to be no brainer. So as product is easy, it has to be an easy decision to to, start using and start benefit as you just mentioned. Yeah. So if you just start your business, if you have not, too many, contacts in your list not too many subscribers, that’s. Absolutely free forever. All the features are included and it’s only usage limits. So start free, start collecting your subscribers, start growing your business and hopefully you will succeed. And once the time comes, you will convert into, premium and paying customer. And and yeah in general, being a, being affordable it’s, very important and having this reasonable pricing and better priced than our main competitors. It’s, one of the goals that we have as we do understand that for SMBs price it’s important. Although it’s an investment, not a spend and a return on investment in general for, email, especially email is challenged. It’s just insane. It’s like for 1 we spend on average our customers, they have return of more than 17. So like a ratio is, extraordinarily good. You would not find any, like any pay that’s or so even, close to that. But at the same time, of course, we understand that for especially the beginners, any spend is spent and you have to have some money for investment. Therefore we, stick. To, to a freemium and it will. Chris Badgett: Nice. Yeah. I think, and that I think is really attractive in the WordPress community, which is very heavily freemium focused, both at the product level, but also what the, user appreciates and expects in a way I was clicking on migration on omnisend. com. And I love this headline here replaced generic with e commerce focused. If somebody is looking at a marketing automation, email list service and so on, what, how do you create that e commerce focus? How is it different from a generic one size fits all marketing automation and email list Rytis Lauris: tool? So there are two main aspects I would say. First one is a deep tool, deep integration, a lot of data being synced with your online store, e commerce platform. With WooCommerce, let’s take example any LMS solution as well. So we do synchronize a lot of your customer behavior data as well as like through our own snippets. We, track your customer’s behavior on your website, on your online store. And those two combined really empowers. Store owners creators, marketers to build a lot of automations, trigger based automation, because you have a lot of data and a lot of understanding of your customer’s behavior. So it’s that’s the 1st thing. So basically deep integration, very specific data points that important for those who sell online, let’s say average cart size, the last order placement habitual things on which we can build segments. We can build automations. And the 2nd thing is really a lot of best practices embedded into the platform. So you would never. It’s 1 of the goals for us that you would never end in, a blank canvas unless you want it. If you choose as a, okay, give me just blank template. I will build everything from scratch because I’m experienced marketer and an advanced user. That’s fine, you can do that. But unless this is your choice you, have an all the se segments, automation, workflows, templates, occasional templates, seasonal templates thematical templates, et cetera. They are wall built and all of them are. Online businesses and e commerce are related. So let’s say it’s all the automations are related to the customer journey on your online store. Activation post purchase activities, abundant card reminders product or service evaluation requests customer reactivation. If one has purchased already some time ago, but but already have not visited your website and have not purchased for whatever your average. customer purchasing cycle is we analyze it automatically, et cetera. So just some of those exam, some of those examples that you really illustrate that being specifically built for e commerce just help our customers to to, gain value way, sooner. You can theoretically do it yourself with any tool in the market, but for that, you would need a lot of knowledge and a lot of development. Chris Badgett: Awesome. And our pre chat I had mentioned, I used to do a lot of work with infusion soft, like 14 years ago. And it had a, it got a reputation being called confusion soft. Cause what would happen is people got really into marketing and funnels and branching and all this stuff. And the campaign builder automation builder I love this idea of. Having all these e commerce focused templates for the use cases you describe, like instead of trying to figure out how to create card abandonment recovery, you already have template for that. Can you speak more about how you quote protect users from themselves and getting overly complicated and help them like. Create campaigns that are or automations that are proven in the industry. Rytis Lauris: Yeah, so basically a 1st protection as, I said, it’s is, really choose from the list of, suggested automations. That’s, the first thing and nothing could go wrong there because those are just standard e commerce practices and the best e commerce practices and any, biggest store is using all of them. And that’s what we advise our customers. It doesn’t matter that you are maybe small business, but the more automation you use, the better for your business. Just to illustrate that. In like previous 10, like 12 months out of all orders around 40 percent of, orders coming from your email were generated by automated trigger based emails or SMS. And. It only was 2. 6 percent of all the traffic. So basically what automation proves proves the relevance, the quality, and the way, better conversion rates in comparison to bulk campaigns. All campaigns still perform, they’re needed, but automations just set up once. You go to sleep and the platform does the job. Yeah. So basically all those prebuilt templates, if you use them, nothing can go wrong. That’s the first thing. Second thing, we have such such limitations that you can set. You can set you as a marketer, as a user of OmniSend you can set that. Okay. I would not like my customer like limits. Okay. They limits that I would not like my customers to receive more than one to five emails per day. You set the limits and that’s how, again, we protect, we help you to protect yourself from misusing sometimes. Maybe, you could make some mistakes with segmenting or so, and maybe put, the same Chris or read this in 5 different segments and send 5 different messages. But basically, yeah, so those are limiting yourself and those tools are in place. So you can. Yeah. Enable them and they will help you to, be sure that you will not overuse. Those are good. Chris Badgett: That’s great. Email marketing, SMS and web push notifications. I think a lot of people have a understanding around email, like welcome series, which I saw you have a template for as well. Kind of drip campaigns. But I think SMS and web push notifications are less understood in terms of the potential for an e commerce seller. How might we use SMS and web push notifications? I literally had a user in our Facebook group yesterday asking about how to do web push notifications. What are some strategies SMS and web push notifications? Rytis Lauris: Yeah okay, let’s start one by one. So SMS is, it’s really, it’s I would say it as a rising star as a channel, especially in the United States and Canada. The reason for that is because it is well regulated, which usually the United States are not the pioneers in regulating something. It’s European union usually but, in this case it’s, the U S and Canada fold. And so basically. This is a TCPA. And and customers are more willing to, sign up for SMS communication because it is so no brainer to opt out. So we just reply with a stop and it’s unified all the platforms have to support this. And this is the only way to actually do SMS marketing. You have to support this opt out default opt out option that anyone could reply with stop word and This is how you unsubscribe. So it’s really no brainer for anyone to subscribe for any communication via SMS because in other geographical locations who is listening to us outside us, et cetera it’s, could be a bit more complicated that people don’t, feel that sure. In case you found this and we always place the link, that’s okay. If you want to subscribe, click here. So it’s similar to email experience, but again, it’s as there are some, marketers who do abuse it with our platform, but with many other platforms that maybe more, more liberal in, in, in allowing you to do whatever you want to do. Yeah, so SMS it’s, a really, great great channel to augment email. And the. In a few examples, just to mention, yeah, so it’s more costly, but let’s say SMS, you could be communicating with your VIP customers. And let them know you are one of our like thousand top hundred of a depends on your business. Yeah. How, much of a customers you have, and you are among our VAP customers. Yeah. So sign up for our SMS communication, and you will be the first to learn about our best offers, best deal, maybe secret deals, et cetera. I have discounts on your arrival. So it depends at the end on your business. So this is how you can use SMS and SMS. Extremely effective. And if a good example, use SMS as a more transactional messages where you don’t promote directly. And I think it’s, let’s say first purchase experience. Then someone purchased from you just send the confirmation text message that yeah, thanks. You placed your order. We got your order. It’s all good. You have that. It’s very important for people to, be sure that the store I bought something from is not a scam. And so this order confirmation is extremely important moment for anyone who buys online. The same of if it’s a physical good. So we already deliver the parcel. Look after that UPS, DHL, whatever FedEx is going to come to you with a parcel, et cetera. Order like follow up. Did you like, how did you like your experience? Did the box arrive on time? Was it good? Did you like a product, et cetera, et cetera. So again, this example where you do not convert directly into purchase, but what you do for very, like few cents you, have an opportunity for a few times to bring your brand in top of the mind of your customer. And it seems to be very transactional. It’s not intrusive at all, but at the same time, This is how you show that you care about the customer. Not only that. Okay. We just paid them. That’s where you forgot about them. And next time, when they’re going to need the same product of other products that you sell, you’re going to be top of mind and they will be coming directly to your online store, entering your brand name instead of Googling and searching who has to offer. Yeah. So this is 2 examples were utilizing as high effect. What is Chris Badgett: what is MMS? Can you describe the difference between SMS and MMS? Rytis Lauris: MMS, basically, just to simplify it, it’s SMS with some media attached. So you can send. Images, let’s say, or you can send more text, or you can send some specific characters if you are not English speaker. So usually you have some in other languages. You have some other word as with with dots, dashes, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So, yeah, so MMS is basically more text, media rich or some special characters. It’s a bit more expensive depending on how much of a content, but it could be, in general, it is more engaging than SMS. Chris Badgett: And what what is, what’s an example of a use case for MMS, like sending a, an image, say, in addition to just a text. Rytis Lauris: In this case let’s say I already mentioned this, like VIP customer group on your arrivals. Or back in stock or back in stock. Yeah. So this is 1 of the very popular automation workflows that we have. So anyone could subscribe not for the entire communication coming from you, but just from a back in stock reminders. Okay. This is the product I’m interested in. And, and and then the, I would like to receive a message when this product is back in stock. So that name tells it directly. Cause usually like people, especially in like apparel industry or some like gifts industry. So the purchase is spontaneous and visuals are very important. So for example, you promote your new arrivals, your new collection. Attaching a visual of a product, especially if it’s clothing really really increases that conversion and increases and engagement a Chris Badgett: lot. I can see that with courses because courses have like a featured image is like a book cover. Hey this, new cohort is now open for this course or coaching program. That’s really cool. Rytis Lauris: Sure. That’s a great, example of sending some quote as as a screenshot from the book. Chris Badgett: Awesome. What about web push notifications? So these are the little sliders that come down in your browser, like how might an e commerce business do use that Rytis Lauris: effectively. Correct. So, let’s say for online courses with an example. So if, you have if you have it depends on your business model. Yeah. If you, for example, if you have some continuous courses, and maybe you charge for each, lesson or each. Yeah. Trench, whatever, separately. So that’s how you can promote. And then that’s how you can reach and invite your customers to subscribe. You’re going to be the first to learn whenever it’s, live. And when it’s live, this is how you promote them. And then the person is browsing any website with a browser. So this is as, you mentioned, the slider is being shown and and this is helpful. What push notifications are very. Very effective just the, challenge here is that businesses don’t use them enough that was four or five times a year years ago, not times, but years ago then, push well, like super popular. And they were a little bit overused. So there was a small group of online merchants that overused too much. And then everybody ditched this channel, but now it’s, I would say being used in in a good way we’ll see a lot of like good practices, best practices being being applied, et cetera, and not overusing and and, yeah, music. So again, ask for. permission, ask for opt in, the customer subscribes, and then very similar. You can do campaigns, you can do reminders, you can do new arrivals, you can do back in stock, new courses released, maybe new comment about the course, or maybe some extension, maybe some free material for a bonus lesson for those who are already Subscribers of your course, et cetera. So that’s what you can communicate via push. Chris Badgett: We have a live audience and Vicky has some questions here. She’s saying that she likes that. There’s a B testing for forms built in. Can you explain that? If somebody is not familiar with a B testing? Rytis Lauris: Yeah, sure. So thanks. We keep asking. So forms, it’s it’s very important for anyone who, use marketing automation. I have it’s ominous under any other platform, but basically in order to communicate with your customer base, you have to have A customer base. So we have to collect subscribers, email, SMS, web push notifications. All of those are opt in channels. So you have to get the permission to communicate via those channels with your existing customer base. So forms are very important. We have native forms at OmniCent and we have a lot of integrations with various form builders. So you can use any 3rd party solutions within WordPress ecosystem as well. We have. Already few and quite many in, in, in the making. So we are again, willing to create them through W3 Fusion. You can communicate to, you can connect to almost anyone. So AB testing within forms. So basically, so it’s just similar to any other AB testing. Let’s say you have 100 visitors. For 10 visitors, we show a version of your form. For 10 visitors, we show B version of your form. It’s all being done automatically. You design it. You, maybe play with your copy whatever you want to test. And we basically initially show both of them and the one which performs. Better, we start showing the winner for the rest of your audience. Chris Badgett: Awesome. And Vicky was also asking about Gravity Forms integration, which is possible out of the box with WP Fusion. Like you said, and WP Fusion works with several other WordPress forms, plugins as well. Rytis Lauris: True. And with Gravity Forms we just. The released direct integration as well. Okay. Previous week. So it’s should be already on wordpress. org. So just try to find there and it will be published on the gravity forms app store as well in upcoming a week or two. Awesome. You can use it through WP fusion, or you can use it directly as well. Chris Badgett: Awesome. And a quick question that came up for SMS was is the interface just all in OmniSend, like you don’t have to try to manage it all from your phone or whatever. Correct. Rytis Lauris: Yeah. Yep. It’s, all in OmniSend. It’s exactly. The same experience, a very lookalike experience. SMS is a bit different. Yeah. So it’s not images heavy and then, the image is rich. It’s not HTML, but yeah, the experience is of any builder would try to have it as, similar to one other as possible. So basically forms building emails, SMS. It’s all within omniscient. Chris Badgett: We get this question a lot. So I’ll ask the expert and I know it’s complicated. But what’s the OmniSend’s approach to deliverability of emails, both at the software level, but also best practices for people using the tool? Rytis Lauris: It’s important how we have a dedicated team to deal with deliverability. So first thing is we are absolutely against spam. Period. So we don’t support any abuses or intense abuse and we block those. And we have dedicated team to fight with the bad actors. It’s cat and mice game rat that they call them. And of course, and there are a few groups, yeah, there are a few groups. One is like the people who are just like opportunistic and that’s okay with them. Yeah. So they know that maybe they have an old list, but maybe they collected this list sometime ago. And the, business was shut down for, maybe they launched a new business, but they have a list from an old business, et cetera, which is five years old, et cetera. Try to send. So basically what, we do we, Suspend them for a while, and we advise what to do and how to clean your list, et cetera. So this is a soft thing. And then that’s okay. We help people to, warm up their domains to warm up their reputation and in order to have a good. Deliverability, you cannot, especially if you have more subscribers, you cannot just come and shoot the first campaign for hundreds of thousands of subscribers. That’s how, you’re going to harm your reputation. So that’s why it’s important to, go through the proper warmup process, et cetera. And we handhold here. We help with that. And yeah, and this is, so that’s good businesses. They try to do that. They try to make some shortcuts and that’s okay. Everybody. Every business is doing that and that’s okay with that. We help them to not to be too strict. We’re not too strict. But again help them not to, harm themselves. And of course, there are bad actors like like criminals, fishers, scammers who have an intent to, to pretend that they are apples, Amazons of this world and to steal a credit card data. And we fight with them and this is a big market. This is a big market. The, yeah, we had some customers whose accounts were compromised and, because they were not treating their passport passwords good enough and campaigns were sent for them, et cetera. So we help them to deal with that. But again any businesses should, take care of them, their customer data at first that’s important. Awesome. Chris Badgett: I heard. One time that people often change their CRM or marketing automation email tool on average, every three years or something like that, if somebody out there is using something like MailChimp and they’re established they’ve got their email list, they’ve got a few kind of automations built, how would they switch to OmniSend? Cause it’s, especially if you’re established, it can seem a little overwhelming to try to move, but what advice do you Rytis Lauris: have there? So with MailChimp or any other generic marketing automation platforms, so we are extremely sure that we’re going to create you way more value than you currently have, mainly because of this prebuilt and embedded best practices. e commerce best practices, because the, usual case we see that people, yeah, they use MailChimp and they just have one or two automations at most, and that’s it. And for e commerce, it would make sense to have seven, eight automations different, and use email, use SMS. And combination of email push notifications. So then once you combine all of those opportunities you see the, growth of your sales coming from, those channels and those practices a lot. And on the pricing side, we we are more affordable than so not, a massive safe, but a safe Yes, and you’re right. The migration could be a little bit time consuming. So to ease that we have a migration tool from Belgium, including, so we just pull all the data, your segments, your context list, your subscribe list, et cetera. And we recreate them on OmniCent. With the visual part, yes, you have to spend a few hours to to, migrate, but we have no doubts it’s worth Investing those few hours and for a bigger customers, we do have migration services free of charge, et cetera. If if, you are a smaller business, so yeah, this is full self service migration tools and place it will take, but it would take like. Up to one hour, I would say to migrate everything. So it’s not not, a huge pain, I would say, and the value, and we’re super sure that we’re going to create you more value. That’s Chris Badgett: awesome. And if somebody’s new and they’re looking for their first marketing automation platform for e commerce house, what do you recommend? What should they do first? How would they start with OmniSend? Rytis Lauris: So just go to OmniSend. com create your account, explore it. It’s always good to get to click around a little bit to see if we fit your needs. If, you’re going to build the design you would like, if you’re going to find the templates you like, et cetera. And that’s okay. There are other customers who love us, but there are customers who say I, don’t like your design or whatever. And that’s, okay. We’re different people. We’re different kinds of businesses, et cetera. And but we, have no doubt. The vast majority of you gonna find. I’m going to send a good fit for you and then of course integration with your online stores either directly if you are on WooCommerce or through WP Fusion if, you have an LMS system, et cetera integrate, because that’s how we’re going to So so much for tuning in. Bye. Bye. Get more triggers coming from you. Then third thing I would recommend launch forms. I have it’s omnis and native forms. So again, integrate gravity forms WS forms. That’s the two direct integrations we already have and building more others again for WFP fusion could be built as integrated as well. So again, it’s very important to start collecting your subscribers and growing the customer base with whom you can communicate. It is very important. Then third thing I would say is, no, maybe it’s four. It’s four. Yeah. Thanks. So the fourth thing is set up automations and people ask us when should I start autumn set up or start my email marketing? So as soon as you have your first order, so it’s never too soon. As soon as you have first visitors, convert them into subscribers, start sending welcome automations, start sending a bundle card reminder automations, and it will help you to grow your business. So it’s never too soon. And and then with campaigns, that’s okay. Maybe to start campaigns a bit later. Go grow your subscriber list to certain size, whether it’s going to be 10, it could be 100 subscribers. It depends on you. But again, the campaigns are more demanding of your time and you have to prepare unique content. You have to think through, et cetera. But like automations, you just set up, as we say, for small businesses, sometimes we see that they set up and they forget and they change every one year. And in the meantime, in that one year we create a lot of a lot of ad already. Chris Badgett: Awesome. That’s Ritus Loris from OmniSend. com. I’m going to go check it out. I’m going to sign up for the free plan and play around. This looks like an amazing tool and a 10 year track record with a focus on e commerce creators and small business. That definitely means a lot. Any final words for the people before we sign off today? Rytis Lauris: Yeah. So thanks, Chris, for inviting. And yes, please check on this and out. We have a great support. If you have any questions, comments, feel free to ask. We’re going to help and maybe just a final call to action for any agencies. Freelancers. We have partners program as well. And this, as I mentioned, we are relatively new in, in WordPress ecosystem. So we are really looking for, partners to work with. And of course there are those commercial side that we do revenue sharing with, for, with our partners. But at the same time we, invest a lot to, help agencies, to help freelancers to better understand what is marketing automation to, to be able to. To, sell your own services better to, to, your customers just by helping you with some researchers some researchers simplified communications as we, maybe you are developer and you will never become an expert of, marketing. But while communicating and talking to your customers, we could potentially ask, so would you recommend me use SMS or not? Why? And and then we can really help you. To, learn certain, main things about, those channels, et cetera, in order to you, for you to be more professional in front of, your customers. Chris Badgett: I appreciate those parting thoughts. I noticed there’s an OmniSend Academy, which I always like to see because every software company is also an education company, whether they realize it or not. So it’s great that you’ve invested there. So OmniSend. com. Thanks for coming on the show Redis. I’ll see you at the next WordCamp. And I hope you have a great rest of your day. 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 at LifterLMS. Go to lifterlms. com forward slash 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 Increase Course and Membership Sales with Omnisend appeared first on LMScast.

In this LMScast episode, Jonathan Denwood talks about the benefits of utilizing WordPress for serious membership websites as well as some things to keep in mind. Jonathan Denwood is the founder and CEO of WP-Tonic, a WordPress-focused company offering services and hosting options for WordPress websites. He provides ideas and points of view on using WordPress to create and grow high-value online training courses. He highlights several topics, such as the advantages and disadvantages of using WordPress for membership websites, what to look for in an MVP, and suggestions for website development and marketing tactics. Jonathan also highlights the value of using technologies like LifterLMS and FluentCRM/MailPoet for membership site-building and email marketing inside the WordPress environment, as well as the significance of digital sovereignty and appropriate hosting. Jonathan further discusses Presto Player, a plugin that works with Bunny.net and offers superior statistics and performance for organizing videos in the WordPress media library. 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 Badgett. I’m the co founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to 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 personal friend, Jonathan Denwood. He’s from wp tonic. com. Today, we’re going to be having some real talk, some honest talk about the pros and cons of using WordPress for your membership site or a hosted solution like Kajabi and so on. Welcome back on the show, Jonathan. Jonathan Denwood: Oh, thank you so much, Chris. It’s a pleasure coming back on your show. Chris Badgett: Yeah, it’s good. I’m so excited to have you. And in our pre chat we were talking about some of the topics that are just evergreen in our niche and areas where we’re really focused and where we have a, goldmine of experience and time in the trenches that we want to really have a frank discussion around using WordPress for a membership site. Or LMS versus a hosted solution. What are the real drawbacks of WordPress? and hat are the real pros? What kind of people or projects are a better fit for one platform or the other? Let’s, dive into let’s start with a negative just because. I’m always so positive and I know you are too, but let’s start in the, on the dark side. What’s the drawback to using WordPress for a membership site? Jonathan Denwood: I think there’s just slightly more hoops to jump through. And in the new year, probably WP Tonic is going to have a new solution. We’re going to continue being a hosting solution as well. But we can talk about that at the end. But I think there’s just more loops to jump through. You’ve got to get a hosting provider, you have to get a domain. But in truth with most hosted SAS solutions like Kajabi. You have to get a domain anyway, but you do have to get hosting and then You have a blanks. And you have a blank page with WordPress, you then have to go and find out, find these, what I call Lego bricks, which are plugins, and you have an endless Feast of plugins and if you’re somebody new to WordPress or just edited as your own or somebody else WordPress website and you like the experience, but you’ve never built a membership. You are, you have audience, you are, you have knowledge in your field. But you never mechanically built out a membership, which has a number of balls that you’re juggling. You just got that blank WordPress website and you just got to go and find. These Lego bricks and then you’ve got to assemble them all together and then build a coherent membership website where if you’ve got Kajabi, you don’t have that blank sheet. You have the key Lego bricks inside. Chris Badgett: It’s just one account to sign up for instead of hosting and all these different plugins and all this stuff. Jonathan Denwood: It’s the hosting, which is only one step in truth, is it? But, then you’ve got to find these Lego bricks, haven’t you? These key plugins that will be your, WordPress text stack that will enable you to build. Chris Badgett: I find myself giving conflicting advice sometimes around creating a minimum viable product or MVP for a membership site. On one hand, there’s an argument that you could just Start with a SaaS solution like Kajabi and get product market fit. Figure it out, and then later, as you want more power and customizability, you can switch to WordPress, but there’s this other argument that why don’t you just start with WordPress? It’s cheaper. It’s lower cost. You don’t have to worry about transitioning out of a hosted platform later. How would you engage with the debate of the MVP? Should you do it on WordPress or should you do it on a SaaS solution? When might that work for different people? Jonathan Denwood: I think there’s two fundamental decisions that you’ve got to make. Is this going to be a multiple course? Membership business, a real membership business where you’re building a real community and you’re probably going to have multiple tiers of different courses on it, which is going to you’re going to build up on a number of years. This is. probably going to, this is going to be a one to five year exercise. But the outcome is a sustainable business, which you probably will give you the freedom to give up your day job or give you more freedom in general. So that’s a great outcome, but if that is not your. End result, you are just looking to add a one course functionality to the services that you are offering in general, and you have no plans to build a multi-course structure. With community, you’ll probably be look, you probably will be better off looking maybe at a SAS, but you just a one off membership plugin. There’s still a choice there, but I think that is another way that you’ve got to look at it. Is it just going to be a one course add on? which you can, in the WordPress space, you can achieve that by just using a membership plugin or you could use something like Teachable or Learnable, which are in the SAS area ideal for that type of setup. But if you’re looking at the first setup, I think you’re for, what I call digital sovereignty, I, not building your business on entirely somebody’s Property that you should try for any business building investing an enormous amount of time and energy on something that somebody totally owns is not a very good business concept in my view, Chris. Chris Badgett: Yeah, building your business on rented land on a hosted platform is not necessarily a great idea. Like recently, Udemy increased their or decreased the amount of revenue share they did with their instructors. And those instructors had no say or control or power to go against that. When it comes to getting started with WordPress for a membership site. What advice would you have for getting started if we are committed to at least dedicating five years of our life to WordPress and how might that be different if we were starting on a hosted solution and plan on being there for five years? Jonathan Denwood: Yeah, I think I’ve just put off half your audience listening to this podcast because I’ve just mentioned five years, haven’t I? But the, good thing about this is, and one of the most Exciting elements of this whole field, Chris, is that five year journey, that five year, a lot of that can be this can be your side hassle. This can be your business that you’re building up gradually. And a lot of propaganda on the internet about side hassles are based on total rubbish. Lies, deceit, nonsense, but what we’re engaged in with your great plugin and this podcast and what I’m trying to do is that we’re legitimately offering a a solution that really offers the ability of somebody to build something as a side hassle that’s real. that isn’t the snake hole. Not saying it’s easy, but in that five year journey, a lot of that can, it can be your side hassle. So that’s the first thing. And I’ve just forgotten your question because I’ve just rabbited on so much, Chris. Chris Badgett: No, that’s good. I like the reframe on the, five year thing. Cause it’s, really a question of how serious are you about this project? And my original question was, how do you get into WordPress if you’re new and you, want to own the platform that you’re building and have the digital sovereignty? What are the key things to avoid and what are the pro tips when getting into WordPress for a serious five year plan membership business that may be a side hustle in the beginning or may always be a side hustle? Jonathan Denwood: Don’t choose really cheap hosting providers. Number one. It doesn’t have to be ridiculously expensive either at W P. hyphen tonic, we start a yearly plan at 35 a month and that will cover your first year at least. easily cover your first year and probably cover a good part of your second year if you’re starting from the bottom up easily. So good hosting. And then your key Lego brick is gonna be your learning management system. And if you’re starting from the ground up, I think LifterLMS is the obvious solution because it offers so much value for the person beginning at the bottom. That is the clear leader. I’m not saying that because you’re a personal friend. I believe that it’s a no brainer. You would start with LifterLMS because a lot of the functionality is free, but you’ve also Very well and logically sorted out add on features that you get in add on functionality plugins, which gives the ability for a very low cost to start off at the bottom and then you have package. Packages as well that are logical. LifterLMS can take you from beginning middle to a very large membership site and deal with the spectrum. And it is going to be the key Lego block of all the other plugins that you add on. Start with LifterLMS. Chris Badgett: Awesome. And what are some of the things people may not be thinking about in terms of removing friction with starting with WordPress? One thing is like WP tonic hosting already has the tech stack sorted for approximately, including the hosting for approximately 300 a year. You can’t start. a business, like if you were going to rent an office, that’s just the, base Jonathan Denwood: layer, actually a little bit high. It’s 420, Chris Badgett: 420. Yeah. But still like for less than 500 a year, you can start. So that’s one thing is to get high quality hosting. Another is you don’t have to do it by yourself. Like you can still find technical talent to help do things on your side or help you with your marketing. What are ways, what are some creative ways to remove the complexity in addition to getting hosting that’s designed for LMS and membership sites? What else can people do to remove pain around the complexity of WordPress? Jonathan Denwood: I think the other key build LifterLMS, the other key decision is what, how are you going to build your website? How are you going to build your landing pages? That is the next key decision and basically for various reasons that has unfortunately become a little bit more complicated, but in some ways we are all seeing the possibility that becomes a much more simpler choice in the near future. At WP we give you two options that I think are the two clearest in our mind, but it’s debatable. This is not black and white. And those two choices are Elementor or Kadence WP. Kadence is a framework that builds on The native WordPress website and page building functionality of Gutenberg, but does it in a very logical and powerful way. And at WP-Tonic, we’ve just finished building a whole series of starter themes on Cadence. That’s part of our hosting package, a library of 15. Starter templates, with different looks but purposely designed. For a membership learning community, and we offer that as part of our hosting package. I think, unless you specifically and I’ve got nothing wrong with Elementor, because I think Elemenr is a professional quasar freelance professional building website tool. It’s still superb. But I think if you’re somebody that’s an entrepreneur, I think Cadence WP on Gutenberg really offers a lot of power without with having a team that can moderate some of the new functionality that’s constantly being added to Gutenberg, that can act as a filter. So you don’t have to deal with the consequences of added new functionality being added. So they act as a editor filter and they’ve added a lot of additional functionality. And I’ve been using Cadence. I still use Elementor and I use a couple of other page builders. But I’ve also built, lately I’ve built a couple websites on Cadence and I’ve just been really impressed with it, Chris. Chris Badgett: Yeah, Kadence has done a great job and it really helps with that blank page problem of WordPress. Like you get sold on the the power and the customizability. But if you start from complete scratch, you have a white screen and no pages on your website. And if you don’t, if you’re lacking design talent, you may not. Be able to build something that really looks good and appeals shifting gears to marketing and content. One, one of the benefits of WordPress is the you’re, basically building content on your website, contributing to your domain authority, your SEO, what advice do you have and where can people remove friction to get. The marketing part of the membership machine rolling and how might, how is that better in WordPress versus a hosted platform? Yeah. Jonathan Denwood: I think there’s two parts of that. I think a lot of people before you do invest time and energy on building a membership website, I think there’s a host. We’re in the end of 2023. I think one of the great things there’s never been a greater time to start a membership website. And the reason why I say that is that there’s never been a more easier or. Time to build a community on Facebook, on various platforms, on YouTube, on TikTok, you name it there’s a dozen different platforms and you’ve got a great example that you’ve discussed recently on my, on the Membership Machine Show podcast, where you talked about a gentleman That teaches party magicians that does special things with balloons and he’s built a whole membership and you would never believe that you could build on six figure ongoing business teaching people how To do special things with balloons but he’s managed it. You could only do that in 2023. You couldn’t do that. I don’t think you could have done that 10 years ago. But I think it’s really obviously some niches, if you only got 10 people in the world, that’s a problem. But if most niches, there’s a big enough world community. So that would allow you to have a sustainable, great business, if you provide the right community environment. So I think that’s the great thing. You’ve got to build an audience, and I would suggest that you try and build it on other people’s platforms and then site always constantly try and get them on your mailing list. Constantly offer upsells through free additional content that’s linked to the content that you’re putting on these other platforms that you don’t own. Always encouraging the people to come to your website to get free offerings that give additional value to the things you’re publicizing on other people’s platforms. And it does, it sounds a lot of work, but these can be just one or two page PDFs that offer curated content. It’s something that I’m going to up my game in 2024. And then, but the thing is to get them on your mailing list, because when you do your first membership, if you’ve got. But engage mailing list, it’s going to make the whole process of getting your membership site launched. So, much easier. Instead of being disappointed by the response and having to grind through the mental hurdle that presents you. You’re, just going to have a nice launch, but not a crazy launch where you just have too many people signing up. It’s going to be controlled and you’re going to have that nice first group of students and you’ll be off and running. And that getting off and running is the biggest hurdle, getting that wheel moving. in any kind of business is the thing that takes so much effort. So if you’ve got, if you’re attracted to those people and you’ve got them on a mailing list and then you can publicize your first course through that mailing list, that’s going to be easy. And that links to what WP Tonic offers, because one of the failings of most hosting is they don’t offer the mechanism to send out marketing email. We do at WP Tonic, we provide very generous. Email marketing limits on our plans and through Fluent CRM and MailPoet to two powerful tools, MailPoet, and you can do both things, but MailPoet is really designed for monthly newsletters. Where FluencyRM, you can do newsletters now, but it’s really a actually more powerful, better tool than ActiveCampaign, in my opinion, and we offer that. So you really do have a very power, because it is getting them on your newsletter, on your list, and then keeping that relationship going before you launch your first course. Does that make sense? Chris, that makes Chris Badgett: sense. And let’s dig in a double click a little bit on this is again a wordpress versus hosted solution. What do you like about a WordPress without getting into marketing automation yet, but just having the email list and the ability to send broadcast marketing emails. What do you like about a WordPress solution like FluentCRM that you mentioned? Versus a hosted solution like a MailChimp, ActiveCampaign, or ConvertKit. Jonathan Denwood: I’ve just recently done a big dive in these and it is as, confusing as it was ever. Now MailChimp was the darling because you could send 2, 000 email. You could have a list of. 2, 000 subscribers, and I think you can send as many emails you like those days have gone. There was a drawback to that anyway, because the actual servers they were utilizing on that third free plan weren’t the best type of servers. So a lot of that email never got to people’s inboxes, but they kept that well. Suppress that knowledge, but those days have long gone because it’s down to 500 contacts and there are other suits. Bravo there is being renamed. I think it was send in blue, but they’re called Bravo now. And there’s a couple of others. But they’re going to charge you, I think, I always look at the thousand contact limit, because I think most, you’re going to get a thousand and then build from that. All of them a thousand, you’re talking about 35 a month, roughly. All the ones that I would consider. But then if you move over a thou, you get from five to a thousand to 5,000, 5,000 to 10, you are, you start then talking hundreds of dollars. With our solution for 35 a month, 420 a year, you can send, you can have, you can send out to 10, 000 contacts unlimited email. That covers almost, apart from the top 10 percent of membership websites, that covers everybody. You will never have to pay any more. And you can send out as many bloody email as you like. That’s why you should look at WordPress. Chris Badgett: Yeah, that’s great. I’m not, I’m thinking hard about that myself because I have a pretty large email list. I’m paying over a thousand dollars a month to active campaign and something like a fluent CRM. Jonathan Denwood: Yeah, I think Jack, from WP fusion was using active campaign and I think he’s just moved to fusion. He wrote a post lately and he’s got a massive list and he’s been totally happy. So that’s a lot of money you would be saving. That’s a lot of money. Isn’t it? Chris Badgett: It is. Let’s talk about another issue that comes up for membership site builders and course creators, which is video hosting and, maybe hosting your own videos. Like in your WordPress media library is not a good idea today because it just requires so many resources. So I don’t, what are your thoughts on video. How to keep the costs down and use a high quality mix of tools or a certain tool to handle your video needs. Cause it’s essential for almost every membership site. And it’s one of those things that’s really painful and hard to change later. Jonathan Denwood: Yeah. When, I was starting, this is the other reason why you need to get your first course up and running and get your first feedback. And I keep going on about that your minimum viable course, do not get it. Do not try and build what I call war and peace straight away. And the reason I’m subject a little bit is when I first started building WP Tonic. We had a fully hosted video solution as part of our package. And it was quite good. There was absolutely no interest in it. So it was a white labelled solution, but it was really good. But I dropped it because then we got a lot of people that had already signed up with Vimeo. And Vimeo, unfortunately, it’s a very great company based in Holland, I think. But they’ve gone the same way as MailRite MailChimp .They’ve upped the prices quite a lot. They’re, only going in one direction, and that’s up the higher because they’ve had a problem with profitability. They were a VC backed company, which was trying to get market share that market share as drink, the acceleration has slowed, and now they’re looking at profitability. So the prices are only going to go up. And video is a really important part of any membership website. Now you, can’t, you won’t be allowed and you shouldn’t store your video on your hosting account. We do have ban limits with WP Tonic. We got to have them because we have had some people that like tried to use our hosting and we can do it, but we need to have a discussion with some, they’ve tried to utilize SCORM files and other very, large very much. That’s the kind of quasar professional, educational, market, marketing area at all. These type of very specialized file formats that take a lot of bandwidth, disk and bandwidth. But video, you should not store video on your hosting account. But the good news is There is a really superb solution here that is less than a one fifth the cost of Vimeo and some of the other providers. And that’s to use a company called Bunny. net and use a plugin called Presto Player. And combine it, we can set it up for you. All you have to do is set up your Bunny, not Bunny. net account. And then give us the login details and then we’ll link it. To the presto player that we provide as part of our package, and basically, you get superb for performance. Plus with presto, you can have your videos accessible from your media library. So it makes the whole, process of managing and also it comes with Presto player has a really enables you to have. Multiple videos in your course, and it also gives you a great analytical data about who’s watching the videos. It’s just a really powerful bundle, but the people it’s really hard to explain that, but we get a lot of interest with people when they are running a medium sized membership course. And they, just get in a bigger. Bigger, bill from Vimeo and there’s some other players in it that cost even more and then they realize what they should have been using Bunny. net with Presto from the beginning because I’m always advising them but they’ve signed up with their Vimeo but they normally when they start getting traction and they coming up for renewal then they go with Bunny and they all wished that they had done it earlier. Chris Badgett: I love that. And I’m personally in the middle of a issue with Wistia, which is a great Jonathan Denwood: video company, but they know how to charge. Chris Badgett: They increase their prices exponentially at the beginning of the year and not just a little bit by many, multiples. And I ended up getting stuck cause I have so many videos and all these different places, different websites. So yeah, it’s an important one to choose wisely. And I’ve been watching bunny.net over the years and they’ve stood the test of time. And people really love them for the service and, the the reliability Jonathan Denwood: and you’ve got an alternative. I think, cause it’s been rock solid, but cloud flair. I’ve also induced a service, but I don’t know if Presto player are going to link it to CloudFlare as well. I’ve not checked that lately. I’d imagine they’re going to add that. So you’ve got now two great choices. One at the present, I will have to double check, but Cloudflare is offering a similar system to bunny. net and they’re both great companies, aren’t they? Chris Badgett: They are. And for you out there watching or listening you’re, listening and watching two people that have been in this industry a very long time. So we’re very careful about the tools we pick. And what we recommend, and you’ve really done a great service, Jonathan, with WP tonic by creating so much value and removing all those barriers. Building a site that’s way more powerful than Kajabi with the same flexibility of being a WordPress solution. You’ve done a great job. Any final words for the people before we sign off today? Yeah. Jonathan Denwood: Just. Treat your membership as a journey. It’s like any business I think, and listening to great podcasts like your own, and hopefully you also listened to the membership machine show. But the great things is a number of podcasts, YouTube channels giving great advice and just feast yourself on that advice. And then it’s about building some online presence. Getting them on your mailing list soon as I talk to somebody and they say, yeah, I’ve got a mailing list. I’ve got 500 people that I’ve attracted to my content. I know that their membership site is probably going to be a success that they’re, they’ve got the will moving. Too many people jump into the membership website and they’ve not thought about. Getting a mailing list. They’ve not thought about getting Facebook group because yeah. I would not build a enormous business on your Facebook group, but would I use a Facebook group to get my first 200 300 people? Sure. Would I use? TikTok to get 300 subscribers. Would I use YouTube? Anybody that’s building a membership website that hasn’t got a effective YouTube channel is not attracting people to the subject. Alarm bells come up to me because it’s totally free and you should be putting up some content. But you should be using that content to drive them to a website and get them on a mailing list. Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. So go check out WP hyphen tonic. com. It’s an incredible value for 35 a month. If you try to do it all yourself, you could be spending 10 times that amount with other tools. Jonathan Denwood: It’s not only that it’s the time you’re going to be utilizing the time. That you should be trying to build that mailing list and building a really nice minimum viable course because it is a lot of work. But the beauty is with AI, Artificial Intelligence, and it’s never been easier to write your syllabus, to write your course, to get the ball rolling. To edit the content. It’s never been easier to get with your fantastic plugin and your team and I’ve got to say what Chris and his team provide in support is just amazing. It’s never been an easier time to get that wheel rolling and to build a membership site, is there Chris? Chris Badgett: That’s right. Now’s the time. So thank you. Thank you for coming on the show, Jonathan. I really appreciate it. Go check out WP tonic and subscribe to the membership machine podcast. Thank you for coming back on the show. We really appreciate it. Jonathan Denwood: It’s been always a pleasure, Chris, having discussions with 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 at LifterLMS. Go to lifterlms. com forward slash 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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In this LMScast episode, Vic Dorfman shares his unconventional journey from being a classical musician to venturing into the online business world. And also he shares how to build a word class membership site. Vic Dorfman is the founder of MemberFix and MemberHost. Vic was a classical violinist until his path changed and he adopted a digital nomad lifestyle after reading “The 4-Hour Workweek”. When he first started his web company, he worked as a freelancer doing SEO and content writing. When he first started his web company, he worked as a freelancer doing SEO and content writing. Vic efficiently grew his staff over time and turned MemberFix into a company that focuses on offering thorough technical assistance for WordPress membership websites. He also explores the difficulties in hosting these kinds of websites, which inspired the development of MemberHost.io to solve the particular technological needs and maximize efficiency. 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 Badgett. I’m the co founder of Lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to 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. His name is Vic Dorfman. He’s from memberfix.rocks and also has a hosting company specifically for the LMS and membership site e commerce industry. It’s called memberhost. io. Welcome to the show, Vic. Vic Dorfman: Thanks, Chris. Good to be here. Chris Badgett: I’m really excited to get into your story today, to get into how people can sell some things we’re seeing in the membership site industry. But before we get into your story, what, how did you get here? What’s, your backstory. And we’ll do that in a second but, first give us the, context of memberfix. rocks. And the hosting company. Vic Dorfman: Okay. So I’ll, walk you through just a quick backstory because it’s crazy how it all came about, but basically I was a classical musician in college. I studied classical singing, opera singing, and I did that for a while. Became a professional musician or started to become a professional musician in that world. It really takes decades to be a proper classical musician and didn’t really like it. There’s actually a lot of politics surprisingly, and you’re just living in a practice room and then there’s still some little kid who’s 10 times better than you. And you make very little money at first and just the whole, this is your. You follow your passion thing. Wasn’t working out for me very well. So quit that join the army briefly decided before I get shipped to basic training, I’m going to go do some traveling. So I hitchhiked across the U S max out all my credit cards, flew to Central America, and then I remember I’m sitting in a little bar. In Nicaragua, in Central America, and there’s just this guy next to me, I said, Hey man, what’s up? He’s Hey man, what’s up? And somebody had given me this book, The 4 Hour Workweek. I’m sure you’ve heard this before. And I said, Hey man, have you ever read this book, The 4 Hour Workweek? It’s amazing, you could do extra. He’s Bro, I’m in the book. I’m one of the case studies. So I meet this guy, Ty, who’s now become a good friend of mine. And he was basically doing like that whole digital nomad, passive income lifestyle way, way back before it was a thing. And then years, later, when I moved to Thailand, we linked up. He lives out here and we became good friends. And basically what happened is I didn’t go to the army. I wound up working for an e commerce company and wasn’t really loving that. I did that for a few years living in Miami. And then at some point, I think I was about 24, it was 2012 or so. I just had this impulse to buy a one way ticket somewhere, anywhere to Thailand, which is where I wound up going. And I just came out here with no money. Actually, I had negative money, had about 23, 000 in credit card debt. A couple thousand dollars in my checking account, old laptop, and I was living in a hostel and just every day going downstairs to the lobby, catching the wifi. Logging into the warrior forum, which I don’t know, this right back in the day and just saying, Hey, can I do anything for you guys? Can I write you an article? I was writing articles, I started to get carpal tunnel syndrome. I said, okay, this isn’t for me. Then I was doing SEO and I think the first thing that I did that hit was that I made a membership site about keyword research. So I was doing SEO stuff. And I wanted to teach the keyword research component. This is back when keyword research was just like the easiest thing ever. And some, one of our members reached out to me and he’s Hey Vic, I like your membership site. I said, thanks, man. He said, can you build me one? Okay. Why not? So I built this guy a membership site and I think he referred another person. To have me build them a membership site. And this was back when there was, I think, two membership plugins. I think there was or there were three, there was a digital access pass, wishlist member, and a member. I think those were the, three, I don’t think there were any LMSs as far as I know. And then it just struck me that membership sites are a important thing. It’s a big thing. It’s probably going to become a bigger thing and there’s nobody who’s really positioned themselves as being a. Membership site expert, or I’m sure there were membership site experts. I know there was like Mike Phil Zane. There was all these marketing guys doing membership sites, even before WordPress custom coding, everything, custom coding their carts. And but I thought, okay, cool. This is a really interesting space with a lot to learn. And I just started working in that area and. Initially I was like freelancing, learning the ropes, learning all the tech learning how to sell, how to communicate with people, all of that good stuff. And then at some point I tried to scale the team a couple of times, didn’t work a week. By the way, we could touch on hiring because I have some pretty unique insights. And I know a lot of the e learning people are like the people who are creating their courses, they want to help, but they don’t want to have unreliable freelancers. So we could touch on that if you’d like. And anyway, a long story short, I did wind up successfully. Hiring. And now we have a really great team in place. We have a leadership team in place. And for the past, I would say we’ve been doing this like over 10 years, including the freelance days. And now after 10 years plus probably. We’re really hitting our stride and we’re really able to help people with their tech, with their membership tech with their e learning stuff, just with the whole technical WordPress component, and we’re just getting great results for our customers. Giving a lot of value is fun and pleasant for everybody. So I feel like. Okay. We’re becoming the kind of agency that we want. We’re still a long way from our goal, but it’s, getting really exciting now to be able to help people at this level and see them succeed. Chris Badgett: Awesome. Let’s. Let’s talk about the difference between memberfix. rocks and, memberhost. io. So what are those businesses that you use to help membership site owners? Vic Dorfman: Sure. So memberfix is our agency side of the business. And it’s, I’m the owner, I’m the sole owner. And what we do is we help to set up, support, and maintain. All the WordPress membership site tech so the e learning component, community component membership component, and then all of the peripheral things and third party integrations and so forth. And so we just focus on the tech side. We don’t do copy or we don’t do coaching or we might do some incidental advising as we’re working with a customer and if we have a great idea, we say, Hey, this might be a better way of doing things. But generally our focus is just supporting them on the technical side and being their tech part. So we have customers who we help on a sort of like a recurring basis who are part of our care plans who just need ongoing support because they have like really big successful membership sites. Or they just don’t want to deal with the tech stuff. And then we have people who just engages for, projects. We we’re working on a couple of pretty big and exciting projects at the moment with some interesting companies. That is the agency side. And then the hosting company actually came about because. Over the years of doing this, what I found is that virtually none of the commercial hosts, the ones that you would, I’m not going to name them, but we’re talking about none of them really understand the technical underpinnings and the technical requirements of these types of sites, right? These are very heavy sites, transactionally heavy sites that hammer the database. Depends on how the plugin is coded some are leaner. And more efficient, some are heavier in that regard. You can’t just cash these sites indiscriminately because it causes conflicts and there’s a lot of little nuances and subtleties about how you optimize performance. On these types of sites, because really what you’re optimizing for is the ability to have lots of concurrent users logging in and interacting with the site without it slowing down, throwing errors. And of course, crashing because then you’re losing money, right? That’s another thing that makes this model unique is that it’s basically if the site goes down or if it slows down substantially, then you’re not able to take new customers. You’re not able to take to serve your existing customer base. So it. It’s quite it’s quite important to our customers to have that level of hosting and support and, niche expertise. And that’s how member host came about. That was actually a partnership that I did with one of my team members. And then our. CTO, our technical co founder, Denny cave, who also runs an agency who also works a lot with e learning sites and who runs an infrastructure company called mighty box. And that’s going really, well. Chris Badgett: Who’s the perfect fit customer for member host. Vic Dorfman: For member host, it would be generally a larger site, hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of members, even hundreds of thousands of members. I don’t think we’ve had a site with a hundred thousand members yet, but we certainly have tens of thousands on a few sites who are willing to or let’s say who, understand that any downtime or, slowdown impacts their conversion rate impacts their their anxiety levels very significantly. And who just want like a partner who basically gets them the best performance because we, our sort of guarantee is that we will outperform any commercial host and we will, we don’t just resell AWS which isn’t even that performance. Not to get super into the weeds, but if you’re hosting your membership site on AWS. Please send me an email because you’re paying double for less performance infrastructure. And so I would say, yeah, ideal customers can be a bigger site, but we do host some smaller sites. We just put them on a single node environment as opposed to a clustered environment. Probably doesn’t mean anything to most of your listeners, but those are the kinds of things that we’re passionate about and that we’re devoting ourselves to every day. So that you don’t really have to worry about it. Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Let’s dig into creative partnerships a little bit. I know that’s a expertise of yours and you’ve been in this space for a long time. You’ve, I’m sure you’ve seen things that work and don’t work. How do we do creative partnerships effectively? Vic Dorfman: I don’t know, Chris, if I can really claim expertise with creative partnerships, because honestly I’ve, had five, maybe five or six. Partnerships. Okay. Why would you do a partnership? Let’s, start with that. Why would you do that versus doing something on your own or hiring people or getting investment or whatever? It’s usually because you don’t have capital or you don’t want to take on investors or take on loans. And you have identified that, okay, if you partner with these certain people that you can put in your sweat equity. And you guys can work over time and build a profitable company and bootstrap it essentially. Maybe you put in a little bit of money, maybe the other founders put in a little bit of money, but it just allows you to, get to market and try an idea a lot quicker. You have more people working on it, more people that are able to contribute some funds. And so I’ve tried a couple partnerships with affiliate sites where I was just the investor, right? And then basically I partnered with a guy who was an SEO expert and then a writer and we figured out the division of equity. Spun up an LLC in Wyoming and got to work and those kind of worked out, but I don’t think I will ever make my investment back. So those are going to be wound down. And then another one we tried to build like a another reason you might want to do a partnership is, and this is more in the context of your team is what if. You have a really talented team member who has a talent in a particular area like we did in our case with our software architect. And we said, Hey, why don’t we build like an analytics suite on top of member press because everybody was clamoring for better reporting for member press. And that turned out to be really, hard. Like incredibly technically challenging and it required expertise that we didn’t have with databases and SQL stuff and like data science queries and stuff. So we, that didn’t work out either. And a member host was born because of this need that I explained that we saw in the market and that actually really did work out and I guess. The reason maybe that worked out is because all of those others failed. So it’s dating around before you have enough understanding about the opposite sex and your own preferences and your. Issues before you, you can effectively select a, great partner for yourself. Actually, it’s very analogous to that, I think. And so when we partnered for member host, I just knew right away, like it clicked yes, all these guys are hard workers. All these guys are at a high level. We’re on the same page. This is a great idea. Nobody’s doing this. Then now other people are starting to do it. And it just worked out and we bootstrapped through music. It’s profitable. I think it’s going to eclipse our agency fairly soon. It’s a much better business model. I think that’s another big factor of it. So I think creative partnerships are probably pretty low percentage, but if, you have a really great idea in a hungry marketplace you could strike it big, but probably won’t for a while. You might have to fail a few times. Check back with me in 10 years. I’ll let you know. Chris Badgett: I love that. I’m a partnership guy too. I just can’t do it all and one plus one equals three when it works. And I, when I look at LFTR LMS users, as an example the, membership sites and the LMSs and the courses that work the best, it’s never a solo act. There’s smart people collaborating, working really hard over a long time horizon. They really compliment each other. Let’s talk more about people and hiring. You’re a traveler. You’re very worldly. Back in the day of early days of four hour work week and online business and stuff, there was this concept of outsourced to a developing nation, get a virtual assistant and delegate, and automate your life. But it doesn’t really work that way. Like how do you, what have you learned in all your collaborations in terms of building team and hiring? Vic Dorfman: Just a quick, funny anecdote on that. I remember when I read the four hour work week, I was, as I’m prone to do, I was proselytizing to everybody. And I, told my older cousin who he was an IT already, and he was quite a smart guy and I said, Hey man, the four hour work week, blah, blah, blah. He’s Oh yeah, I read it. And he said something like I think the author overestimates the ease of outsourcing things offshore. I said, fuck, do you know, do you even read the book? I was such a punk. And of course that’s true. It’s not easy to find good people, whether remote or in house. And as I told you like I try to scale member fix. Multiple times. And initially I started by trying to scale in India, in the Philippines, which are like the classic outsourcing locations. And also apropos that you mentioned, like I’ve, lived in different places. I’ve lived in Thailand for 30 years. 13 years now I’ve been all around Asia, South America, Central America. And I think the reason it didn’t work with, and I’ve had other people echoed this experience as well. The reason it’s hard to find, a team, maybe you can find good individual freelancers, just great people everywhere. So don’t miss misunderstanding is because of the work culture, but also the broader culture of Asian countries, which is a lot about face never telling your boss. No. Saying yeah, we can do that regardless of whether that deadline is realistic, regardless of whether you have even taken the time to understand if you have the capacity or capability to do something. Myself being Ukrainian by birth. Growing up in the U. S. I thought, okay why don’t I check out Eastern Europe? Because that was percolating at the time. And that turned out to be where we hire all of our team members and the culture there. The broader culture and the work culture is more like. Speak the truth do it tactfully, ideally, right? But don’t evade what is the case. Call a spade. If you say you’re going to do something or deliver something on time, you have to do it. Otherwise, it’s like in the West don’t tell white lies. Whereas in Asia, everything is white lies. You always have to read between the lines. And again, this is a broad generalization. And there’s exceptions to that, but if you’re looking to hire, whether for your team, if you’re running like a information company, LMS membership or whatever, or like for an agency like ourselves, you hiring is already such a time consuming and expensive. Difficult process that you have to fish in the right pond, right? Yes, you can fish in this pond where you’ll catch maybe a good fish from time to time, or you can fish in this other pond where like your chances of catching a big juicy fish are a lot higher and that’s been my experience. And yeah, Eastern Europe is really great. Chris Badgett: Do you have any tips on how to recruit in Eastern Europe, for example, like certain websites or ways to advertise the opening or, scout for talent? Vic Dorfman: Yeah, I actually wrote an article about this on, our blog. It’s called how to hire rock stars in Eastern Europe, something along those lines. But I think you, you probably want to start with Upwork, right? Because that’s by far the biggest marketplace for online talent. I’ve tried some other marketplaces like what’s that other one job rock, which is specifically for Eastern European team members. But I find that Upwork is really great. Now with Upwork, the trick is that if you want good people, right? They have options. Good people have options. You need to sell them, you need to sell your company. And you need to sell your mission. You need to ideally believe it. And a lot of people have responded to my job post and said, Hey I usually don’t respond to invites, but I really love what you wrote there. So I really took time to write the copy. And try to communicate what we do at Member Fix, why we’re passionate about it, why it’s important, why it would be cool for you to work with us, because it actually is super cool to work on our team and, and the other key, I think, is that you can’t just post your job very much. Like you can’t just put up a sales page and expect the money to come rolling in. You got to then go and reach out, like actively search for people on Upwork that have like great profiles, great feedback. Like those are the people that you want all things being equal and their budget considerations and so forth. But all things being equal, you want the best people you can afford. And so you got to go out and get those people and basically seduce them with your wares has been my experience. Chris Badgett: Nice. You mentioned selling the job position. Let’s talk more about sales and how to, especially in this online world, whether we’re selling a membership site or courses, or we’re An agency or whoever we are, how do we stand out in this noisy market when we’re selling? Vic Dorfman: I don’t think you necessarily have to stand out in terms of let’s say your product. It would be nice if you did, right? But a lot of people make a really good living selling variations of the same thing. But as we were discussing before the call, I don’t want to get too deep into it because I don’t want to give it all away. Because we might talk about it again later, but basically. I think what I’ve seen with at least membership site owners is a lot of times I think they confuse the they confuse the business with the delivery system of the value. Like a membership site is like your delivery system of value where you give the people the stuff or part of it, let’s say it’s not the business. Or it’s not like the business model, right? So it’s hard to separate that. So I think maybe because there’s a lot of the blind leading the blind as well. People think, okay, I’m just going to put up a membership site. I’m going to put up a sales page. I’m going to pay for some Facebook ads. I’ll get somebody to write the copy and then I’ll I’ll have a bunch of members join. Yeah, if you’re lucky, that might happen. If you have a big audience, that might happen even despite the fact that’s the wrong thing to do. But I think if you’re under like a million dollars a year as, a information business or membership site or e learning site or community, like if you want to get there as quickly as possible go do prospecting, which that’s a whole big conversation but, go do prospecting get on zoom calls with people. Find out what their needs are and say, Hey, I have this thing, which is a really great thing. It comes in the form of a membership site. You might even find out that a membership site is not the optimal delivery vehicle for your, for the value. You’ll probably find out a lot of other really useful stuff, like what kind of language people use when describing their problems. You can use that same language back to them. And yeah, I think. You just got to get on the phone that’s, a lot of people are averse to that. And even you, said, Chris, like you said, I’m an introvert I, get on the phone and sell all the time and yeah, it’s not that hard. If you have a great product, it does all the heavy lifting and you don’t even have to be pushy. You don’t have to be salesy. People will sell themselves a lot of times if, they have a legitimate need and you’re actually able to. fulfill on that need and you have good testimonials and stuff. And then once you’ve done that long enough and you have enough customers bringing in enough recurring revenue, then you can start leaning more on the sort of like more passive. Things like building out your funnels optimizing your paid ads your, return on ad spend and social media and all that crap. But that is so secondary in my mind. So peripheral to just going out, finding where your prospective customers dwell online, right? Building relationships, giving as much value as you can up front, like giving so much value. It hurts for free, not expecting anything in return. This is all Alex Hormozy basically but it’s, it, that is what it is. And then getting on calls with people and they will sell themselves is, the truth. Chris Badgett: Any other tips on just having a strong business model where selling becomes more obvious and easy? Vic Dorfman: Like within the membership space, you mean? Yeah. Like membership element Chris Badgett: space, yeah. How do we get a strong offer? I feel like a lot of people, like you say, get caught up in the mechanism of the membership side and the tech and the passive income goal and stuff like that. But how do we build a strong offer that becomes much easier to sell? Vic Dorfman: I guess the first thing I would do is read like all of Alex Hormozy’s books. That’s he has a book called a hundred million dollar offers, which. Explains exactly how to do exactly that. There’s a lot of technique to it, I think, but to give a less cop out answer, I think if you, it’s doing, exactly what I just suggested, going out and talking to your prospective customers. Understanding them deeply understanding what you’re offering relative to their pain points. How are you solving it? Maybe do it for free a couple of times figure out how you can really help people. Like I think crafting an offer needs to be done like. Like in the context of deep collaboration with your customers, right? Because they’re going to tell you what they need. You’re not going to guess it. You might, but you’re probably wrong. So my suggestion is just go out and okay, if you want to get just using a weird analogy, but if you want to get really good with women, don’t read a bunch of books on how to talk to women. Go and talk to a bunch of women. And ask women like that’s that’s been my experience. And I think it’s very similar to people will tell you what they want. If you just shut up and listen ask good questions, take notes, take it seriously, think about it for awhile. And, yeah I think that’s the approach I like. Chris Badgett: Yeah. Sales is a lot of listening and in order to listen, you need to find the right people and talk to them and ask questions. And the pitch is really just the end. If it’s a fit, if it’s qualified. Any. With all your time in this space, any like unconventional counterintuitive insights you’ve gleaned or fun stories of something that’s really working for membership sites, either on the tech side, on the sales side on the niche side, counterintuitive Vic Dorfman: things, man, I don’t know, like. I was telling you before we started the call that there’s just so many things I’ve seen that just don’t make sense, logical sense or you mentioned a great example yourself, right? I don’t know if you’re at liberty to discuss it on air, but yeah, sure. It’s like, the balloon thing who would even like do that? And think that they’re going to be successful. And then he did it and he is successful. I don’t know if you want to like Chris Badgett: Yeah, we could get into that. Ziv Raviv, a Lifter LMS customer in Israel is a kid entertainer. Like he ties animal balloons and like host those kind of birthday parties. And he built a multi six figure business and it just keeps growing every year for the past five years. The total addressable market for balloon artists is around 5, 000 people worldwide. And when you look at his website and people making literally entire outfits out of little teeny balloons and building these big displays and teaching tricks with balloons. You just realize how big the world is. And I think one of the interesting things with someone like that is they are the market they’re serving. They’re just further along in the journey. That seems pretty tried and true. It’s one thing to spot an opportunity like, Oh, I heard there’s, opportunity in cryptocurrency as an example. But are you a crypto trader? Have you been down the Bitcoin rabbit hole? Are you are you, have you been in this niche for five years in multiple bull markets or whatever? It’s not about just opportunity spotting. And you mentioned Alex Hermosi. Jim launch and serving Jim owners. He was a gym owner. And he had to do gym sales, he did a bunch of turnarounds. He had, he got burned in partnerships and then he figured it out. And it’s just doubling down on, you. That’s almost, I think not that counterintuitive, but it gets overlooked. Sometimes as entrepreneurs, we go to the new shiny thing or. See somebody else making success, but are you actually in that niche yourself? And if not, maybe, and you really want to do it, maybe you should partner like you’re talking about. That’s how I got started. I, partnered with experts around the world in permaculture, which is a niche within organic gardening. I knew internet marketing and, websites and online, but I found the best experts in the world and we built a successful like online business. And, but I would fly on a plane to Costa Rica to go film a permaculture workshop in the middle of the jungle. Because that’s what the skill set I brought to the table. So I don’t know, we’re just riffing here, but if you’re not like you are Vic, I’m passionate about membership sites and online business and marketing and sales, and you know what, you and I have been in this field for since the four hour work week or before, which is a long time. It’s been like 15 years or something. So, we have a few, we’ve seen a few things and we can talk the talk and help other online business owners. Yeah. So I love niches and I love that you’ve niched on serving the membership site owner. That’s a really specific niche and like you’ve stayed focused on it year after year. Vic Dorfman: Yeah. And I, it’s it’s. I love everything you just said, man, by the way. It’s just that’s a general rule of the universe is that people will listen to somebody who they see who’s undeniable, right? Who manifests through and through what they’re trying to teach other people. And some people are a little further along, but it’s important enough of a distinction to where they could still effectively teach. But like you made me think of a martial arts example would you learn? martial arts from some random dude, like in a shopping mall in New Jersey actually, there’s actually a lot of really tough dudes, random shopping malls, New Jersey now, but you would want to learn from somebody who, like, you look at them like, okay, I want to be like that guy in that area. And it’s very hard to fake that. So using your balloon example, the guys like. He does that. He does that. And so other people like, oh, I do that too. And no, it’s super interesting. It’s super interesting Chris Badgett: The the great thing about your focus on membership sites and, what we’re talking about with partnerships here is a lot of subject matter experts who’ve been in it for a long time are not figuring out from like 500 web hosts in the world, which one’s right for me. You’re there to partner, to help people do what they do to teach the balloon tying, the jujitsu or the gardening or the cooking. Or the what, whatever the niche is Vic Dorfman: that’s the hand weaving. We I don’t know if, can I highlight some of our super interesting customers that we work with? Just, yeah, I love it. You love niches, right? So yeah we have this great customer. Her name is TN and she runs the hand weaving academy. I think it’s handweavingacademy. com and she was she’s a former Google employee and she left her Google job to do this thing. And it’s she probably knew because, and now that I have more experience, it’s actually not surprising because hobby niches are like the most passionate groups of people. In general. But I just didn’t know that was the thing. And then we have this other customer, Brittany, and she does crochet and some of these sites in these really weird niches. Are doing great great revenue or like great profit. Even we even had a customer and this is something that I would never think would work. So a lot of counter, when you talk about counterintuitive stuff, I think what’s counterintuitive is like what you think would actually work. And you’re almost not qualified to tell somebody who’s in a niche. I do know that you have to stick with something long enough for it to pan out sometimes. So there’s the working smart versus working hard thing, but this really great couple Mike and Karina, they run a love letter from Ireland. And my Irish heritage I think it’s my Irish heritage. com and basically they help people discover and understand their Irish roots and it’s such a huge thing. Like people are so into that and it’s it’s super cool and they’re passionate. They travel all around Ireland. They’re like out there taking photos of and video in these beautiful locations talking about the families and clans that come from there. It’s so freaking cool, man. Like what people do. And yeah, I don’t know, that’s the most unconventional or counterintuitive thing I would say. But other than that, I think it’s mostly just following sound business practices taking care of your people, working hard, trying to work smart, learning doing your sales, doing your marketing and being, patient to a degree, which it’s hard to do. Chris Badgett: I love that. Patience is definitely a good one. That’s counterintuitive in this fast paced world. And that’s why the niche is important, because you’re going to be here for many years, so you might as well pick something you love, have some patience with it, keep learning and sharpening the craft yourself. I love it. If you’re watching this or listening, we are going to be doing a special webinar presentation with Vic to help you be more successful with your membership site. So keep an eye on your inbox for that. Go to LMS cast if you’re not subscribed. So they’d make sure you’re on the email list. To get the notification about the training. If you’re looking for web hosting for a successful scaling membership site, and you really want something that’s rock solid and just step outside the noise and the shopping paralysis of the 500 web hosts out there. Check out memberhost. io. Take a spin by Vic’s others website, memberfix. rocks. See what’s going on there. Any final words for the people, Vic? Vic Dorfman: No, not really. I think we covered pretty much everything. Definitely come to the webinar. We’ll, be doing, I’m going to try to give away all the things I know, I don’t know that many things, but all the things that I know will give to you. Chris Badgett: Awesome. Thanks for coming on the show, Vic and sharing your story and those insights there. We really appreciate it. Vic Dorfman: My pleasure, Chris. Thanks for having me. 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 at LifterLMS. Go to lifterlms. com forward slash 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 a Word Class Membership Site with Vic Dorfman from MemberHost appeared first on LMScast.

In this LMScast episode, Chris Lassiter shares his experience with WordPress and AI. He also discusses the effectiveness of his website, built with LifterLMS. Also discuss about how people can build a mobile app for their LifterLMS website with BuddyBoss. Chris Lassiter is an experienced WordPress professional and AI enthusiast. He built an AI course website called ‘Learn AI Now,’ a customized learning platform constructed using LifterLMS. His website, Learn AI Now, helps users learn more about AI and how anyone can easily use AI to create courses. Chris discussed the reasons for choosing LifterLMS, emphasizing features such as LifterLMS Group, which stood out as a unique add-on not provided by other LMS platforms. The uniqueness of LifterLMS features played a crucial role in his decision. His creative application of AI extends beyond personalizing dashboards, resulting in a seamless user interface. Additionally, Chris created an app using BuddyBoss and integrated it with LifterLMS. His goal was to establish a secure social media platform akin to Facebook. The integration with BuddyBoss enhances the social aspect of the site, and the accompanying mobile app enhances accessibility for both iOS and Android users. 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 Badgett. I’m the co founder of Lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to 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, another Chris, his name is Chris Lasseter. He’s from Learn AI Now, he’s built an incredible learning platform that teaches AI. He’s had quite the journey as a WordPress professional, as a AI practitioner, and he’s out, he’s here to help people learn AI. Chris Badgett: I’m really excited to get into your story, Chris. Welcome to the show. Thanks, Chris.  Chris Lassiter: Thanks for having me. Chris Badgett: Tell us a little bit. Let’s start with the platform now. What is learn AI now? Why’d you build it? What is it? Chris Lassiter: Thank you. So learning now is is a platform to where people can come to use. The tools that Lifter LMS has created to create their own courses and to have a safe platform for learning. So if you compare us to like other tools for example Udemy where you can go there and you can post your courses and sell them. It’s similar but it’s more narrowed down in a place to where people can come and not only create their courses, but, use the tools that we’ve given them to create their courses. And we also have a social media aspect where they can join groups. Have zoom calls and be able to just create a community and have one on one on time with me to be able to help them create tools. To be able to teach other people what, whatever that they want to create. So it’s going to be a great opportunity for them. Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. So multi core, a multi instructor course platform around the AI topic. Tell us about your journey into AI. How did you become obsessed like myself and many other people out there with AI?  Chris Lassiter: So for me I’m not a coder and. I, I’ve been working in WordPress for about 15 years now. I’ve read the books about, HTML, PHP, I can look at it and go, okay, this is what I need. These are the questions I need to ask. But when I came out and it just opened up so many opportunities for me and, just to be able to sit there and be able to type out your thoughts. And be able to use a tool that can help generate those thoughts and make them make them happen. It’s just been fantastic. And, throughout my career, I’ve been wanting to help people all the time and be able to have a tool here that can allow me to help people. Is one of the main reasons why I built learn AI now is because helping people is something that I’m really passionate about. And, using AI tools to be able to get my thoughts out there to help people has been the driving force.  Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. You sound a lot like me. I’m 15, 16 years in WordPress, but I’m not a coder. Tell us about the origin of the getting into WordPress. Cause that’s quite a while ago.  Chris Lassiter: Yeah. About 15 years ago I created a business. It was called a head serve and basically I created a website and WordPress for my first time to be able to offer gaming servers for people from Counter Strike. I had a business for about three years. And then someone approached me and asked if they could purchase the company. At that time I was in transitioning for my job. And so I was like, oh, sure. I don’t have the time. And so I was able to, use that opportunity, working with clients and I was like, this is really exciting. So fast forward about, I’d say about eight years, I decided to open up my own web design company. Finding out, web design is a lot different from coding. And so I started using tools designing in WordPress and it became a very successful company and I ran [00:04:00] it for about three years and I decided to, at that time I was moving overseas to Japan and I wasn’t going to be able to support all the clients that I had. So I reached out to some very successful companies out there and I sold all my clients. Out to them they’d be able to successfully continue running their websites and I put that company on pause and fast forward. Now, here we are in 2023 and I decided to relaunch my LLC, which is fast web creations, LLC, and with that learn AI now falls under that category. And here I am building Learning AI Now, which falls under my web development company. So I’m really excited to, to be back at WordPress again. Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. That’s quite the journey. Tell us about the decision to use Lifter LMS. How did you select LifterLMS for learn AI now and building this course marketplace? What factors went into play to select your  Chris Lassiter: So, I looked at a lot of tools that were available for LMSs. And one of the main reasons why I was able to lean toward Lifter is because there’s a company. That I work for part time and, they were using LearnDash and then they switched to LifterLMS because a lot of the add ons that you guys have was able to allow them to give opportunities to their customers that other LMS’s don’t have. And being able to bundle those add ons the way that you guys do it was able to allow the company to save money. And be able to build that relationship with their customers. So I noticed that LifterLMS, I believe cares more about their customers than they do about making that penny. o that was one of the things that was the most positive turn on for me. Was seeing that you guys truly care about your customer base. And then that the technical support that I need was there. So working with the company and seeing, some of the struggles that they may have in some areas, because not every LMS is perfect. But being able to back that up with the support and the add ons that Lifter had, I was able to decide to Hey, that’s the company I wanted to go with because. When you go to spend, monthly, yearly payments with the company I want to be able to go with someone that I knew that I would trust. And the product that LifterLMS has put out there really gives me that trust and the people that work for the company. And that’s the one of the main reasons why I decided to go with Lifter. Chris Badgett: I appreciate that. Thanks for saying that. Are there any specific features in Lifter that.  Chris Lassiter: Yeah. So the groups feature is really pretty fantastic especially since the company that that I work for the way they use it is it’s they teach dental companies their front offices on how to run their admin offices. And so what that allows them to do is a, for example, a doctor office will come in, the doctor will buy. A subscription, a yearly subscription with them, and they’ll get access to a group. And for example, they’ll get 21 seats in the group, and they’ll be able to bring in their admin offices their personnel in there and be able to learn how to run an admin office for dental companies, and they’ll be able to get 21 seats in there. And so what I was able to do is create with the power of AI. Is be able to when the doctor office signs up, it auto creates the group for them and gives them the seats that they need. And so they can go ahead and start right away without someone coming on the back end, created the group for them. Give them the seats that they need. It automatically does that. It sends the email out. And so they’re able to, they’re able to start right away and start learning within the platform. So LMS group was one of the the biggest driving points for me.  Chris Badgett: Awesome. Awesome. I’m infinitely fascinated and I do this too as a non coder. I use AI to help me like I had to do a landing page the other day in this like old school HTML editor thing. I was like, I’m just going to make it over here. And I asked AI to format the HTML and do all this stuff. And it was like five seconds done. Tell me about your journey to using AI for coding. Like what’s your approach? And if somebody else. Who maybe could expand their skillset by just leaning in a little bit that maybe they can code with some AI help. What would you say to them?  Chris Lassiter: I Would say that you don’t have to know coding to use ai. Now, over the last 15 years that I’ve used WordPress, like I said, I’ve been able to recognize like key words. Especially with [00:09:00] PHP which is, the main coding system that is used. But being able to go into AI and go, Hey for example I’ll use Lifter as an example. So you guys have a way to where instructors. Can create courses and then they can assign an assistant instructor. And so what I was able to do was with some help from some Lifter LMS tech support, and you guys, the fact that you guys are an open source software. I was able to take the code that you guys used to create the instructor role and the assistant instructor role. I copied that code, put it into the AI and I told them what my idea was. And what it was is when you log in it right now, Lifter LMS allows instructors create courses and those assistant instructors to create those courses. But you can still see. The way that I run my software, you can still see other instructors courses. And so what I wanted to do is I wanted to restrict that. So you can only see the courses that the instructor made and that the assistant instructor made. And so I said since WordPress is created by post, I was like, I want to restrict the posts that instructors and assistant instructors create so only they can see their own post. And what that did was is now when an instructor logs in, they no longer see in the back end, those posts that other instructors have made. They only see their posts. And the post that it’s assistant instructors make. And then also I restricted the media. So when you go to upload, you don’t see anybody else’s media that’s uploaded. And so it’s able to lock that down and be able to create an environment to where I can have as many instructors as I want, and they can only see their courses on the backend and then the assistant instructors that are assigned to them can only see. Those courses also. And so that’s what AI has been able to help me create. And it’s been pretty fantastic.  Chris Badgett: That’s really amazing. And you did something with your dashboard recently. What’d you do with it? Oh, yes.  Chris Lassiter: Yeah. Oh, no. So yeah, that’s been pretty fantastic. So if you go to a Lifter LMS is a Facebook page. There’s a video example of I was able to use a front end admin plugin and what it does is it takes the link of anything in WP admin and it displays it on any page that you want using a short code and then you can use that plugin and be able to remove items from any what’s displayed in an iframe and I’ve been able to basically create a dashboard and restrict the WP admin backend. So when an instructor comes in, they can click at the top, click instructor dashboard which that link can only be seen if you have the instructor or assistant instructor role. So not everyone can see that link and then, or access that link. Then when you go to that link, it displays whatever was in the WP admin backend on the front end. And so they can click on create courses, reporting they can click on media and upload media and download media, and it keeps everyone out of the back end. So it creates an easy tool and it works really good on the phone too.  Chris Badgett: That’s pretty amazing. You figured all that out. That’s really awesome. Front end course creation and all the rest of that. Let’s talk about BuddyBoss a little bit. You use BuddyBoss and you’ve created an app. With LifterLMS and BuddyBoss, tell us about first why BuddyBoss and then tell us about the app. Chris Lassiter: Yeah. So one of the main reasons why I wanted to use BuddyBoss is because I wanted to create a safe Social media platform like Facebook. But a lot of people they just don’t like to use Facebook or they’re restricted and they can’t use it because of their job. So I wanted to create a social media aspect to where they could come to my website. Sign up to create courses and be able to have groups for example, like Lifter LMS, they have a social media aspect within Lifter but BuddyBoss is able to expand on top of that. And they have an app for the iPhone and Android. That they already have created and if you sign up for they have do it yourself or they can actually assist you with the app and get it approved inside of apple and android. And this app allows people to access their courses and be able to access their dashboard and everything within the app. What’s really cool is. Even though BuddyBoss has been specifically made to be primarily used for LearnDash, you can still use other LMSs. Within the app and, I’ve actually today I’ve been able to show you on how that works. If you don’t mind, I will go ahead and I’ll load it up for you and show you how it works and it’s been pretty fantastic. So just give me 1 2nd here. I’m gonna go ahead and launch this real quick. Chris Badgett: And as you’re loading that, I’ll say. we Do get a lot of requests for LifterLMS BuddyBoss app, but BuddyBoss hasn’t added that yet. So I’m really keen to learn from you how you did that and what the output is. Chris Lassiter: Yeah. So they have a thing called I believe it’s called web callbacks. And so what I’ve been able to do is. So you see here can you see the app we can make  Chris Badgett: a screen a little bigger here. And if you’re listening to this on the podcast, just head on over to the LifterLMS YouTube channel and look for Chris Lassiter and you’ll see the you’ll see what we’re talking about here. Chris Lassiter: When you first log into the BuddyBoss app You can configure the bottom menu to show what you want, basically. So like the group itself, this right here is, you can have as many groups as you want. And you can be able to see what other people are talking about, send the messages and so forth. But what’s really cool about the app is I put the course catalog here on the front. As you can see, it it goes outside of the app. And basically it connects directly to my wordpress LifterLMS. And so here you can be able to access your courses. I’m going to show you what’s really cool about this. So right now this is a course explaining on how to use the AI tools on learning right now dot AI. And if you go into, for example, like the second lesson plan, and you go into the second lab here. This is a course that I’ve created for teachers to show them on how to use AI in creating a lesson plan. For example, if you go here and you type in, let’s say they want to do like a lesson plan lesson plan on the first, U.S. President. Okay. Let’s say for 5th grade and then just at generate, I’m able to use my AI tools in there and it sets them up with a lesson plan for 5th grade and there’s just so many more AI tools that I can generate in here. But this one I specifically made. So when they write this. It will give them everything they need to create a successful lesson plan. And then let’s see what else they can do here. So you can go back and go through more of the courses. You can see the quizzes, the labs, and then we also have like the forms within BuddyBoss. And then here’s something really cool. You’re talking about the dashboard. So if I go here and go into, for example, the dashboard right here. This is the right here. You have access to the left LMS and to the dashboard. This right here is the actual dashboard for LifterLMS. But when you go here, since there’s a callback, it actually goes to my actual website. I can pull up the website here. I can bring up my instructor dashboard and this is the dashboard that was created using the front end admin plugin. So right here, you’ll see like the admin tool that pops up for since I’m admin or what have you. But you have courses. You have lessons, media, [00:18:00] reporting, and so let’s see here. Let’s see how this works. If I go to add a course. It works a lot better, obviously when you’re on desktop. But as you can see here, that it launches and then I can load the course builder with inside here and then you can add elements and so forth and start building your course. You obviously don’t want to do it on your phone, but it’s really cool that you can actually access that. For example, let’s say you’re on your phone and you wanted to really quick log into the media you could upload and so forth like that. So it’s really cool. And just the fact that, people can go in here and, view their courses while they’re online and be able to access private groups, public groups,  Chris Badgett: one of the most advanced app implementations I’ve ever seen of Lifter. What advice do you have for people that want to go down the app? Like a companion app to go with the WordPress LMS website. Like how do they get into that? Chris Lassiter: I would recommend, when you, so when you go to use a buddy boss, I would definitely go with their services to assist you in setting up the app. They do give you a lot of good tools to try to do it yourself. But if you’re not a web app developer it’s a very long process and very tedious. And being able to use their excellent custom support that they have they can help you every step of the way with tutorials on the process that you need to do. Since I went with their help, they actually, they help you create all the app photos, the pictures, everything that you saw in there like when they first logged in and you saw the picture of the login, they created all that for me. So what they do is they’ll send it to you and then you upload it into the Apple store or the Google store. And then once you’re ready, you hit the publishing service and they will upload it to the Apple store and the Google store. And then anything that they come back and say, Hey, it’s not ready yet. This is what you need to do to fix it. They’ll explain to you on how to fix that. And then once the app is ready, it launches after that. It’s fantastic because once you meet the requirements for both the stores, you have your launch. You have your app launched whenever there’s updates to the app, it will automatically update it. It’s, what’s really cool is, unless you change like the actual icon or the name of the app, it doesn’t make the person who downloaded it on the phone, it doesn’t make them re download the app. It just automatically updates it because it’s connected directly to your WordPress website. And so I can make any changes within the app, like the menu options. Make changes to the courses, anything like that, and we’ll automatically update on the app. So it’s really fantastic. And you get some push notifications so you can keep your people aware of what’s going on. Send private messages. It’s really fantastic.  Chris Badgett: You just answered my next question, but what is the, what are the main reasons to build a companion app to go with the website version of the LMS? You mentioned push notifications, private messaging. I imagine you’re in the workflow of people that are more used to apps than websites, but what, what else? . Chris Lassiter: So actually it’s funny that you bring that up because in your guys’ last LMS cast Kurt and Will, were actually talking about that, and I saw that. They actually brought me up as an example in that. So it was pretty cool. And, do you need an app to successfully have ALMS program? No, you don’t. Matter of fact, you should actually take a look at the use cases and see if that’s something that you need. And the reason why I wanted to do it is because with this generation of people that you have, they want something that they can access quickly and a lot of people have phones. And people want to be able to access [00:22:00] sometimes their courses offline. Now, you can’t do that with Lifter LMS and with the BuddyBoss app. But why would you want to do that? And so I wanted to be able to create a tool to where people can access their courses online right away, be able to communicate within private groups. And be able to do that on your phone at any time that you want is pretty fantastic. Another feature that’s going to be coming out hopefully in the next six to 12 months is right now on the website for groups within buddy boss, you can actually create. With the zoom A. P. I. Those private groups can create private conversations using your A. P. I. With zoom. I know that buddy boss is currently building it. So eventually you can be able to access those zoom meetings within the app. I know it’s not. It’s not gonna be released anytime soon, but being able to have a zoom meeting on the go within your private group [00:23:00] within the app will be a pretty fantastic tool. And so just going along with them and all those future updates and all the future updates from lifter, it’s just fantastic. Chris Badgett: Can you tell  us about any other like tech tools that you find are like part of the essential stack? For example, what kind of hosting do you use? What do you use for email marketing? Any essential other plugins that you would put on any LMS website? Are you logging into the back end right now?  Chris Lassiter: I am logging into the back end right now. So for me LifterLMS has a, so the company that I work for that uses Lifter LMS. They use LifterLMS’s own payment gateway and ordering system. But what I’ve been able to do is use sure, sure part with sure members and sure triggers. And so what I’m able to do is being able to control how I use my coupons and how people access certain parts of the website with sure members. And then we’re sure triggers it’s it automatically triggers. Like for example, when someone comes in and orders a membership, it will trigger that membership to activate. And so that is something that I think people should definitely take a look at is if you want to have more advanced features. To be able to control coupons and just just the way that when purchases are made you can use other ecommerces like, you can use shirt cart. You can use WooCommerce. And so that’s one of the things that I went down. Another plugin that is really great is something called better docs. Whenever you have an LMS software, you want to be able to have a knowledge base on the back end and being able to have people to use a knowledge base to be able to figure out how do I create this course? You can Better Docs is what I use, and right now I’m currently creating a knowledge base based off LifterLMS’s knowledge base and all my other plugins knowledge bases and the way that I’ve implemented it on my website to be able to create a place where they can just go on the website and be able to ask questions on how to create courses. So that’s a fantastic one to have. Another plug in tool that I think it’s very important to have is a tool that backs up your website. So all in one WP migration is great. You can be able to go back and forth between a staging website and a active production website. If you have an LMS website, it’s very important to have a staging website. So when LifterLMS comes out with new tools or you have new plugins, You can back up your website to that staging website and be able to. Edit and create whatever you need to. So if something breaks or if something doesn’t work with lifter or with another plugin you can be able to talk to lifters outstanding tech support. And be able to figure out how to fix that. And then once you’re ready to go, you can bring that to live production. So that’s definitely something that you should have. And I would say one of the last ones last two plugins I’d like to talk about is Presto player which is also created by the company who created SureCart. It’s basically allows me to upload my videos. I use bunny dot net to upload my videos. I don’t upload them to YouTube because bunny dot net is a CDN. And so it allows me to stream my videos. Through Presto player on my website and it gives them a seamless integration and there’s no buffering it’s just fantastic. And then the last thing that I use is it’s a free tool. It’s just WP mail SMTP. I connected to my Google business email and that’s how I send emails out to all my clients. And it just integrates it with. WordPress seamlessly. So those are some of the the great tools that I use. Chris Badgett: That’s awesome, Chris. I have to ask, cause you’re like a power user of WordPress, LifterLMS, and other technology. What’s your approach to learning? Cause it seems like every time you hit a challenge, you just break through it and you also keep leveling up your skills over the months and years. How do you approach your technology learning? Chris Lassiter: So one of the biggest thing is not giving up and being able to ask the question and enjoying the LifterLMS groups on Facebook. There’s also a developer channel in Slack that LFTR has joining other private Facebook groups within WordPress and just. Being able to reach out to other in the communities who also want, who loves LMS is and WordPress plugins and just all that it’s staying connected with other people and asking the question you just can’t take a failure and it’s just a fail and just walk away from it. You have to stay positive. You have to communicate. And you have to connect connect. If I didn’t connect with people with Will and Kurt and, you have Nick who does awesome tech support for you guys being able to communicate with them and say, Hey, I’ve used AI to create this. It doesn’t sometimes, AI is not perfect. It’s not going to give you all the answers, but it’s going to get you to the right place to the right person. Who is the expert. And who will be able to communicate with you and you can learn from them. They can learn from you. And so connection, you have to communicate, you have to connect, you have to be out there in the social media and just, paying attention to when stuff comes out and learning from people and just staying positive and connecting with people is how you’re going to succeed. That’s awesome.  I love that advice. I think it’s always important to remember that there’s a bunch of humans behind the internet and sometimes you just got to engage with them and and reach out and choose the companies that value that sort of thing. What’s your vision for LearnAINow. ai? Like where do you want to end up? Chris Lassiter: So long term I would like to not only have LearnAI as an individual membership. I would also like to be able to set it up for private school districts and even big picture public school districts, and be able to allow teachers to be able to come and create online courses for their students, and, but also at the same time, have districts send teachers to my website and not just teachers, also companies, send companies to my website to be able to learn online. On how to use AI tools. Cause I’m not specifically building it just for teachers. That’s just I guess you can say my focus right now. But I’m also creating it so people or companies can send [00:30:00] people to my website and be able to learn what are the AI tools that are available. To be able to help their company succeed because that’s the whole purpose of learn AI now is to help not only companies, teachers, just anyone out there who wants to learn how to use AI tools to just succeed in life. And succeed in their companies. It’s a bigger picture, be able to get corporates to come in and use learn AI now to help their personnel to, to learn how to be successful with AI tools.  Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. It reminds me of a slogan I borrowed from another LifterLMS user. Their mission, our mission is to accelerate yours is like the slogan. And I like that you’re sending out like a ripple of innovation and helping people help people who then help more people. It’s what makes us, this is what keeps me motivated and passionate in this space. Do you have a short list of AI tools that you like? I think everybody watching or listening has heard of chat. GBT and perhaps uses it some. You’ve got some AI tooling on your app or on your website. What AI tools should people check out that you’re a fan of? That’s probably a loaded question. You might have a lot.  Chris Lassiter: Yeah, so there are a ton of AI tools, man. And there’s so many good ones out there. Yeah. Okay. So there’s a really fantastic AI tool out there called AI engine by meow, like MEOW, if you just search AI engine by M-E-I-O-W. It’s a word, a WordPress plugin that you can use on your website and help integrate chat GPT into your website. That’s a fantastic WordPress plugin. They have a free version. I’ve worked with the developer with that tool. And so that’s a fantastic tool to use. A really great high tool. Matter of fact, is with the big company. Adobe has integrated AI into a lot of their software. So I’ve been able to utilize Photoshop and be able to take pictures and use the AI tool to, for example expand on top of a picture. And for example if you have a picture that’s really small, but you want to make it bigger, you can use the AI tool within Adobe to select the edge of your picture and just generate an expanse, and it will use AI. To generate the picture and and be able to basically just expand it. So it’s fantastic. So Adobe has integrated AI there. There’s just so many out there. Yeah, there’s a load of question, but AI isn’t everything that you use. But Adobe has done a fantastic job integrating AI into their software.  Chris Badgett: If we go back to the beginning and somebody’s watching or listening to this and they’re, inspired and they want to create. Online course marketplace and a platform like this. What would you say are the first steps to ease into the project?  Chris Lassiter: I would say, do your research, find out what tools that you want to use. Every LMS has different tools. And being able to know what tools are available and, the use case from is very important, figure out what you want to use and how you want to use it. And then the second part of it, and I think is the biggest part is what type of community do they have? Private and public Lifter LMS has a fantastic public community. And being able to join those communities and being able to have the people that back it up is very important. And that goes into the third part. Are there real people behind that LMS? There are other LMSs out there that may have, um, fantastic tools. That lifter does not have available yet, but the people that back it up aren’t there that, they, you don’t know who the real people are. And I think being able to have a face and a name and knowing that you can easily access that support and just that community. That you just can’t put a price on. And so being able to know that, there’s a community there. It’s probably like the third biggest thing and being able to have that community, having the tools, knowing how to use it, having a knowledge base on that LMS to be able to help you when you’re in a situation is what I wish I would have known in the beginning. To be to help me get to where I am now, because it’s taking me a while to get where I am now, but if I’d have known all that from the beginning then I think I would have made it. I would have been able to get to where I am quicker. And so that’s 1 reason why I’m just happy to be here with Lifter is because, we have that community. I have you[00:35:00] you’re always putting out videos with Will and Kurt and it just keeps me motivated and it keeps me creating my tools with Lifter. So I’ve been pretty happy with it. Awesome.  Chris Badgett: Chris, thanks for coming on the show and thank you for being an inspiring example of what I call an education entrepreneur. You’re doing amazing things. I appreciate your, you being a power user and really staying with any challenge and just keep. Keeping, making progress on your vision. Do you have any final words for the people before we sign off today?  Chris Lassiter: Yeah. Stay motivated. Stay connected and don’t give up. And when you get a chance, come visit. Learn AI now.ai and hopefully it will help tools for you to help you succeed in creating your LMS courses.  Chris Badgett: Thanks for coming on the show. Chris go to learn AI now. ai. And I hope you and everybody listening has a great rest of your day. Take care. 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 at LifterLMS. Go to lifterlms. com forward slash 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 Build a Mobile App For Your LifterLMS Powered Website with AI Educator Chris Lassiter appeared first on LMScast.

In this LMScast episode, Dr. Jared Sinclair from Sinclair Performance Institute discusses how to build capacity, navigate change, and improve performance as an education entrepreneur or WordPress professional. As a dynamic leader with a strategic mindset honed across diverse sectors, including government, private, education, and non-profit, Jared Sinclair possesses a proven track record in spearheading operational excellence, enhancing capacity, and driving performance improvement. Dr. Sinclair discusses the intricate relationship between discipline and motivation. He views discipline as an extrinsic motivator, essential for maintaining momentum when intrinsic motivation diminishes. Emphasizing the need for a clear ‘why’, he advocates for structured routines and systems to stay motivated, especially on challenging days. The conversation then turns to the dynamics of team motivation. Dr. Sinclair highlights the importance of aligning team efforts with valuable outcomes. He suggests that effective leadership involves setting clear expectations and empowering team members, thereby fostering a sense of agency and commitment. In the context of education and coaching, Dr. Sinclair points out the significance of facilitating meaning-making for students and clients. He emphasizes the role of educators in helping learners synthesize information independently, which is crucial for sustained motivation and effective learning. Dr. Sinclair introduces the SMAC framework (Systems, Motivation, Accountability, Communications, Knowledge) as a comprehensive approach to expanding both individual and organizational capacity. This framework serves as a guide for identifying and addressing key areas that impact performance and growth. A highlight of the podcast is Dr. Sinclair sharing a success story from his professional experience. He recounts how strategic planning and operational organization significantly transformed a non-profit organization, underscoring the power of well-implemented strategies in achieving organizational goals. The episode concludes with Dr. Sinclair addressing the common challenge of imposter syndrome, particularly prevalent among course creators and entrepreneurs. He advises focusing on strengths and passions, and taking incremental steps towards goals. This approach, he suggests, can help overcome doubts and lead to meaningful progress and success. For more insights and in-depth discussions, connect with Dr. Jared Sinclair on LinkedIn, YouTube (Performance Collective), or via email at jared@sinclairperformance.com. 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 Badgett. I’m the co founder of Lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show. Chris Badgett: Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMS cast. I’m joined by a special guest. His name is Dr. Jared Sinclair. You can find him at Sinclair performance. com. We’re going to be talking about leadership. We’re going to be talking about capacity building. We’re going to talk about motivation. This is going to be a good episode around the inner game of being an education entrepreneur about leading a team. Chris Badgett: About leading your students as a teacher. Welcome to the show, Jared. Thanks, Dr. Jared Sinclair: Chris. I appreciate you to have me on. Chris Badgett: Yeah, I’m stoked to talk about it with you. Leadership and [00:01:00] management and peak performance are all things that are near and dear to me as a busy guy who’s been doing this for a while, trying not to explode in the process and be a good leader. Chris Badgett: Let’s start at the heart of the issue and take us to school around motivation, particularly around three areas. One area is just being a motivated entrepreneur ourselves, like self motivation. Um, second, if we’re building a team, sometimes I see a lot of entrepreneurs, whether they’re creating courses or running an agency where they’re motivated, but they’re having a hard time getting the same levels of performance in their team. Chris Badgett: Or they just wish it was higher, not that it’s bad. And then the third is specifically as a teacher or a coach, when we’ve been hired to work with students or clients, how do we create motivation within our learning experience design? So sorry to throw three questions at you at once, [00:02:00] but let’s, let’s talk about motivation. Dr. Jared Sinclair: Yeah, all good. So to dive into, to the self, I think, you know, there’s this. discussion that’s everywhere. You’ve seen it on Rogan. You’ve seen it on some of these other podcasts. You’ve seen it in the literature, the pseudoscience, whatever you might have. And it, it, it’s the art, this argument of, okay, discipline versus motivation. Dr. Jared Sinclair: I would argue that discipline is simply a system that we use to motivate ourselves. So it’s a, it’s an extrinsic motivator that we’re using to motivate ourselves when we don’t necessarily feel motivated. So when you talk about motivating the self, I think it’s very important to have that why. Why are you doing what you’re doing, right? Dr. Jared Sinclair: That’s kind of the first stop. The second stop that I would say is to have this structure of Uh, maybe you have your office set up in such a way or you have your coffee first thing and then you take the dog out and you come back to your desk and you hit that big first, um, you know, chunk that you need to bite off, maybe some [00:03:00] type of system in place where you’re doing the same thing the same way. Dr. Jared Sinclair: Every time and that’s for those those more important topics that you’re doing throughout the day now Let’s say you got to get a module done or you have to outline something For a course you’re putting together that big chunk might be that first Outline that you do in the morning because based off of that outline, you know, you’re gonna be able to build out everything else So if you get that win, it’s kind of like some of these guys are talking about make your bed, right? Dr. Jared Sinclair: It’s making your bed. So you get that early success. You can move on to the next ones and then I would say the third thing is Having a system in place for when you don’t feel motivated, so you have that discipline to do things. Uh, some folks do it with time blocking. They might block, you know, 15 minutes and then take a 5 minute break, walk around the house if you work from home or walk down the hallway to the water cooler or to the copy machine or, you know, to your buddy next door and say hi. Dr. Jared Sinclair: But building in those, those blocks of times could be [00:04:00] helpful. Some other things that folks do is they they’ll tear their day where they’ll have those most, you know, top three things that they want to accomplish throughout the day and then everything else is just noise, right? So tackling those first three things in order to free up that space and create some margin where you have more time and energy to tackle those other things. Dr. Jared Sinclair: So I think a lot of the times we get burnt out as individuals because either we’ve taken on too much, we haven’t taken the time to outline our day or provide that clarity or that path forward. And then when we have these additional things. Uh, bombarding us throughout the day, we don’t have that margin that we need. Dr. Jared Sinclair: And that margin is very important, uh, provides psychological safety, provides a space for you to be creative and space for you to deal with those things that come up during the day that we might not necessarily have planned for. So that margin components very big. Um, as far as leading the team, I think when you break down motivation from a team perspective, [00:05:00] you got to look at the value. Dr. Jared Sinclair: Uh, it’s a value proposition. What, what’s the value to the team as a whole? You know, is there a, a completion bonus or is there some type of pay raise or just the, the, the pride of accomplishing that task? Um, if you can tie that action to something of value, now they, they can see that their work is being, uh, is contributing towards something that’s gonna be valuable in the future. Dr. Jared Sinclair: Uh, there’s various types of values. I don’t want to, I don’t want to go into too much detail and nerd out too much on there, but there’s a lot of value from physical value, um, kind of these internal, uh, value propositions that we have. And then there’s like instrumental value, acquiring things that will allow you to do other things. Dr. Jared Sinclair: I would say the next component from a team perspective is expectations of managing those expectations. And within that, you have this whole kind of control versus non control component. So as leaders, we want to hire the right [00:06:00] people to do the work and then we want to really set them free so they can go do the work when we hire people that are capable of doing work and then we don’t set them free. Dr. Jared Sinclair: They’re in an uncontrollable environment because they can’t control their destiny. They don’t have agency over what they’re trying to do. So from that perspective, it’s too constricting and with with constriction and regulation and whatnot, especially in educational space. When you’re trying to write course content, you’re trying to be creative or make these connections in various locations throughout your curriculum. Dr. Jared Sinclair: It’s important to have that agility and that creativity. But with those constraints as leaders or in a team environment, Oftentimes it will stifle that creativity and, uh, which will stifle growth and stifle productivity. So the last one I think you touched on there was, uh, a teacher, a coach, is that it? Dr. Jared Sinclair: Okay. I had to write it down because there was a lot there, but let’s get to it. Chris Badgett: So are students or learners or client coaching clients different from team members? Or is it really just the same [00:07:00] stuff packaged a little Dr. Jared Sinclair: differently? I think from like coaching clients, you know, they’re on the receiving end or the students are on the receiving end of that learning. Dr. Jared Sinclair: I think for them it’s the meeting, the meaning making that will help them stay motivated, right? Because you have this kind of, this external force, which is your delivery, your content, your whatever, your questioning, your Socratic questioning, whatever the case may be. And they have this, Internalization of that and when they’re able to make those connections and they’re able to have those aha moments and they’re able to synthesize information on their own, even though it was prompted by you, it’s more valuable because they came up with that. Dr. Jared Sinclair: Aha. They made the connection where in reality they didn’t. They were kind of helped along the way. Um, or it’s a combination of both. But I think that’s where it’s helpful to motivate them is giving them opportunities to make those connections. Make meaning and have those aha moments. Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Chris Badgett: That’s super helpful. Um, so [00:08:00] with the discipline thing, like I just, whenever I hear that word, of course, now I think of Jocko willing discipline equals freedom and I’m a big morning routine guy and time boxer. And when I feel, I don’t feel at my best, I just execute the routine, right? Even if I do it poorly, I, I just do it. Chris Badgett: And I’ve been doing a morning routine so long, it’s been over a decade that. I feel worse and lost when I don’t do it. Like if I’m traveling or something like that, but unplug unpacked discipline, a little more. And how it’s different from motivation or like, it’s, it sounds like it’s a tool within motivation. Chris Badgett: A hundred Dr. Jared Sinclair: percent. And what I’d point to in that is self determination theory. If you’re in a self determination, there’s a lot of charter schools popping up right now, they’re in the self determination, you kind of self guided learning. But when you look at that theory, it talks about somebody who’s a motive on one end of the spectrum. Dr. Jared Sinclair: I think my camera’s reversed, but on one end of the spectrum here, where they have no [00:09:00] motivation, there is no motivation. And then when you kind of overlay this. Transcripts provided by Transcription Outsourcing, LLC. And people are able to be prodded and prompt towards a certain behavior, right? So you have a boss, you have your significant other saying, Hey, you told me you were going to do this today. Dr. Jared Sinclair: That’s an extrinsic motivator. You have that LMS little notification thing pop up saying, Hey, your course is due. Right? That’s a motivator where, in the theory, people can go across the spectrum from there’s this position of a motivation. And now this external kind of accountability system where there and I would argue discipline those things that you have to do is your morning routine fall into this category over time. Dr. Jared Sinclair: When you do them long enough, they become automated. So you go down this path of it being external to this path of now you’re internalizing it to now it’s Automated in an automotive state. So [00:10:00] you go from a motive to automated potentially, depending on those discipline systems or those systems that you have in place, or those accountabilities that you have in place. Dr. Jared Sinclair: It’s a big, ugly word, but accountability is do you have in place to do the things that you, your team or whoever else wants to do awesome. Chris Badgett: Let’s let’s switch gears to one of my favorite words, which is capacity. And the reason, and I know you help with capacity building, and I want to unpack that. I don’t have a laser question, so I have to talk around it a little bit. Chris Badgett: Like as a software entrepreneur, I always wish I had more. You know, engineering capacity as an example to ship the vision of the product faster or, um, you know, I, sometimes I wish my team had more capacity given the constraints of time. Now cashflow can solve wounds and allow you more budget to grow a team. Chris Badgett: But when you’re bootstrapping as a course creator. Or any kind of entrepreneur. Um, [00:11:00] you’re working with limited resources and it all starts with your own internal sacrifice and capacity. Sure. Tell us about a different way to think about capacity, both in output and quality of work. Like how do we level up there as individuals and through teams? Dr. Jared Sinclair: Yeah. So I would say capacity is what you have in that space between. Capability and current performance, right? So you’ve pushed your circle out. If you will, if you have two concentric circles, you have this. This capacity is the exterior circle and the interior circle is kind of what you’re what you’re currently operating at. Dr. Jared Sinclair: And that margin. Around the edge is very important because that is room for growth, right? So if you’re not hitting that outer circle, if you will, I mean, just for that visual, right, what we try to do is we try to enhance that capacity. And I use a framework called smack. Um, it’s one of the things that I’ve [00:12:00] written on. Dr. Jared Sinclair: It’s kind of the talk that I go to because it encompasses a lot of what organizations and individuals are challenged with, and it’s just S M A C K. The S is for systems. The M is for motivation. The A is for accountability. The C is for communications, and the K is for knowledge. So within this kind of capacity, uh, discussions, if you touch on all of those letters within SPAC, you’re gonna hit on those big topics that help individuals and teams to perform at a higher level to expand their capacity. Dr. Jared Sinclair: Let’s take knowledge, for instance. You have, you know, you’re in the knowledge space. So you have this, this component of what’s the existing knowledge? Well, you want to expand that knowledge. Well, how do you expand that knowledge? The first question that I would ask as a consultant or somebody that comes in to coach a team or to build a system around this problem is what type of knowledge are you trying to expand? Dr. Jared Sinclair: Are you trying to expand, you know, procedural knowledge that know how are you trying to [00:13:00] expand declarative knowledge that know what? Or are you trying to expand that reflection knowledge that metacognitive knowledge? What type of knowledge within your organization are you trying to expand? And then within that, We either provide learning opportunities to expand that knowledge, or we create kind of a churn within the organization, this kind of organic churn, where people are going out to find that additional knowledge, because now they’ve identified what that barrier is. Dr. Jared Sinclair: So with, with all those letters in the acronym of SMAC. What I like to do is look at each one of those and kind of dissect it and see, hey, where can we improve this with minimal inputs to kind of push that inner circle out a little more, that outer circle out a little more if we’re kind of meeting it already. Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Let’s dig in on accountability a little bit. How do you build healthy accountability that, you know, people look forward to or enjoy? It’s an example. And I think an [00:14:00] extreme example, I don’t do this, but I know online businesses that, uh, they don’t trust their employees. To spend their time well. Chris Badgett: So they install like a screen recording software that takes screenshots, every whatever, to me, that just feels like very creates a culture of distrust. What’s on the other end of that spectrum in terms of positive accountability? Dr. Jared Sinclair: Yeah, I think, I think it involves interaction on all, on all parts, right. Dr. Jared Sinclair: And communication, there needs to be a component that the individual, let me just back up for a second. And in any accountability relationship, there’s a provider and a director. The director is the person that’s kind of in charge and kind of, uh, call on the shot saying, Hey, this is what we need to get done. Dr. Jared Sinclair: This is direction we want to go. And then the provider is the person that’s responsible for, for doing that. We can go, I mean, this is a whole separate episode in and of itself, but let’s dive down that rabbit hole of the screen, the screenshots and how do we get people. Um, how do we hold people accountable absent those [00:15:00] kind of extreme measures? Dr. Jared Sinclair: And I would say it takes communication and collaboration. Um, there needs to be a sense of buy in, right? Remember we talked about in motivation earlier, we talked about that value and that that value attainment, right, attaining that goal. Well, oftentimes when things are closer to the self, they’re closer to us. Dr. Jared Sinclair: They’re more important and oftentimes we will leverage more energy towards accomplishing that. So if we have this external thing that the organization is saying, Hey, this thing over here, go do that. Um, and we’re going to hold you accountable to it. That’s probably a little less powerful than than saying, Hey, this is kind of the direction that we want to go. Dr. Jared Sinclair: What do you propose we do to get there? And how are you gonna hold yourself accountable to those metrics, right? What are those metrics? Um, and that’s another component that’s pretty important is metrics. I’ve seen, I’ve seen organizations go super overboard on metrics, not only in the learning space, but, um, you know, depending heavily, so heavily on KPIs that they kind of forget there’s people behind them and systems behind them. Dr. Jared Sinclair: Um, Um, [00:16:00] so I think that engagement and getting, giving people a voice and giving them buy in and allowing them to kind of dictate where they want to go within, you know, that if you use the analogy of a bowling lane, you got those bumper lanes on the sides, like that whole runway is yours. We just got to go knock down those 10 pens. Dr. Jared Sinclair: So within these left and right kind of bumpers, how do you propose we do that? And then how are we going to know that you’re making progress on your plan? Right. There’s a lot of use in there towards that goal. So giving ownership to the people, I think is very important. Chris Badgett: I love that. Also in your, your smack analogy and capacity talking about the margin, um, where does burnout fit into that? Chris Badgett: And then also. It, you know, that model really makes sense. If you, let’s say you have a junior team member and over the years they level up, then let’s say you hire a senior person or even you yourself as like the, um, [00:17:00] the entrepreneur or whatever, like you’re kind of hitting some capacity walls that are starting to feel kind of solid. Chris Badgett: And, and like, you just can’t time box anymore. And there’s only 24 more hours of the day. Right. There’s also this personal development thing of like, there’s always another gear. I just need to find the next unlock. So, so there’s kind of two questions in there, burnout, and then. What do you do with like people that are already kind of peak performing, um, capacity Dr. Jared Sinclair: standpoint? Dr. Jared Sinclair: Sure. So I’ll address the burnout issue first. Um, typically burnout is due to lack of margin, right? Yeah. Lack of money, lack of time, lack of resources, lack of energy, whatever the case may be. You’ve pushed that inner circle too close to that outer circle. And you don’t have enough margin for when that phone call comes in or that boss puts the additional project on your desk or the dog gets sick or, you know, your kids are out of school. Dr. Jared Sinclair: So whatever the case may be, margin typically will, will lead to burnout. [00:18:00] Now, when I talk about margin, you can talk about it in the cognitive sense too, right? You want sufficient level of stress on somebody’s abilities and sufficient level of challenge. Um, you know, but when that stress level gets too high, that challenge level gets too high, oftentimes that can lead to that cognitive overload as well, right? Dr. Jared Sinclair: So this whole concept of margin, I think, applies to just about everything. Um, just having sufficient buffer on that inner line. But that outer line really is that capacity. So either by reducing, increasing the buffer, or increasing the capacity. You’ve got more margin and that inner circle can have a little more flex as far as performance is concerned So burnout burnout is pretty dangerous. Dr. Jared Sinclair: I’ve seen a lot of folks go downhill Um when I talk about it in the leadership space, I talk about it from the sense of like leadership fatigue So if you’re a leader running a team of let’s say folks who are responsible for you know, x y or z [00:19:00] When leaders get burnt out, they end up start doing a couple things. Dr. Jared Sinclair: They start either doing their people’s work for them. They start micromanaging. They stop that visionary kind of, um, supervisory kind of roles and they start doing the work. And with that, their, their own capacity and their own margin starts decreasing. The capacity might be there, but their margin starts decreasing. Dr. Jared Sinclair: And sometimes that comes with resentment. It comes with substance abuse issues. It comes with stress issues like the whole nine. So I think managing that burnout component is very important. Not not pushing yourself to the point where you don’t have enough margin, but also not pushing your people to the point where they don’t have margin or expanding their capacity so that that additional workload or that additional task with additional ask. Dr. Jared Sinclair: Isn’t so burdensome on them. Um, I’m sorry, I’m blanking on your second question Chris Badgett: there, Chris. My second question is like, is there a limit to capacity expansion for human being, [00:20:00] particularly as it relates to either a seasoned entrepreneur who feels like they’ve really leveled up and there’s just. But they’re not really expanding capacity anymore. Chris Badgett: They’ve kind of hit peak capacity. Is that just okay? Or is there always another unlock or how do we think about that for peak performers? Dr. Jared Sinclair: Yeah. So in the, in the business landscape, I would look at that very, you know, the thing that resonated with me when you, when you were asking that question was like a tech startup, a lot of times, even a normal startup doesn’t have to be a tech startup, but they’re, you know, they’re, um, they’re known for this. Dr. Jared Sinclair: Typically what’ll happen is you’ll get those one or two or three. Folks that have gotten together said, Hey, let’s start this right and they start this and none of them are specialized. Well, sometimes they are, but that can be a burden to a startup team. Oftentimes with a startup, you want a bunch of generalists because somebody’s going to have to be doing, everybody’s doing marketing, right? Dr. Jared Sinclair: Somebody’s going to have to do finance. Somebody’s going to have to do R and D. Somebody has to do compliance. Like there’s, there’s all these hats that people wear during the startup phase. So their [00:21:00] capacity very quickly becomes maxed out, right? So what I would argue, and it’s hard to say without a specific business or specific case study though, is that when you get to that point where capacity is tapped out, you have to do one of two things. Dr. Jared Sinclair: You either have to slow down and limit the offerings that you’re providing. Or if that’s not in alignment with where the business wants to go, now it’s time to scale. It’s time to expand your, your offering. So Oftentimes what we see in the startup space is that these, these teams of startup founders typically get something going and they get to this point where they’re super uncomfortable and they’re super stressed out and maybe they’re in the third, fourth, fifth round of funding, whatever the case may be. Dr. Jared Sinclair: And then all of a sudden they’re like, okay, now we have to start hiring people. And what that does is then from there, it expands their capacity. So their capability is still pretty small, but it gives them that margin to continue to grow outwards. Um, I do think there is a limit on the individual, um, capacity building as well as organizational capacity [00:22:00] capacity building. Dr. Jared Sinclair: But the, the beauty of organizational capacity building is that you don’t have to do it all yourself. You uh, forget that quote by Steve Jobs. I think it was Steve Jobs, but he nailed it. Like we don’t hire smart people so we can tell them what to do. We hire smart people so they can, you know, do what they do essentially. Dr. Jared Sinclair: Um, I truly believe in that. And if, if you’re going to grow and you’re going to take your business to that next level, you’re going to have to hire people and you’re going to have to offload that trust to them and trust them that they’re going to do the things You know, you’ve hired them to do again. We get back to that accountability piece, right? Dr. Jared Sinclair: So, uh, I would say, yeah, that’s it. You could, you could scale for sure. You could increase your capacity on the organizational level. I think easier, um, than once you’re tapped out at the individual level, but through professional development, through introspection, through, um, you know, focus, I think us as individuals can expand capacity to a certain extent. Dr. Jared Sinclair: I don’t think the world is endless. You know, we can’t [00:23:00] do. All those things that our parents said we could do if we put our minds to it. It’s just not possible. It’s a big lie. Um, we can do a lot, uh, but not independent and individual separate from a team. Chris Badgett: What’s can you double, double click a little bit on that thing about entrepreneur founder generalists and like kind of what makes them special or, or in some ways they might not even see their, see it or recognize it in themselves in terms of, um, That kind of gift they have as a generalist, but it’s also very dangerous and burdensome, like you mentioned, if you go far and, and start stepping outside of that margin. Dr. Jared Sinclair: Yeah, I think it’s, I think it’s necessary, frankly, as a founder to be a generalist. I think you’d be good at a lot of things. Um, and the analogy that I’ll use is let’s say we have a pie shop, you know, if we have an apple pie shop, um, and we’re make, or let’s [00:24:00] say we have a bakery. Sorry, that was a bad analogy. Dr. Jared Sinclair: Say we have a bakery and all we make is apple pies. We’re not a bakery. We’re an apple pie shop. So if you have that CEO or that founder CEO that they’re very good at tech. What’s going to happen to the marketing and the fundraising and the HR and all these other things that need to happen as that business is growing, it’s going to fall to the wayside. Dr. Jared Sinclair: So what we need is a bakery. We need a bakery that has some brownies, some lemon meringue, key lime, some apple pies, right? We need this whole kind of well rounded. ecosystem where people that have their own respective strengths can play into what the organization is trying to do and where they’re going. Dr. Jared Sinclair: So although at the outset being a generalist is very important, oftentimes these startup companies will find themselves in a place where now they have to start finding those people that are more narrowly skilled and they have a greater expert expertise in those narrow spaces. Now, I’m not saying as a business gets super big that there’s no need for [00:25:00] generalists because there certainly is. Dr. Jared Sinclair: Uh, the world would not function if everybody was a specialist. It just, it wouldn’t. Um, but as they get bigger, they can have more specialists in the sense of R and D research, um, uh, HR finance, you know, you name it. Chris Badgett: Tell us about the Sinclair Performance Institute. Like what, what do you do? Describe your perfect client. Dr. Jared Sinclair: Yeah, so our perfect client is An entity within a larger, larger organization, I’d say, you know, a division, maybe a hundred people or less, maybe up to 200, depending on what they’re trying to accomplish or a small business that is, uh, in those, in that startup phase or they’re. They just have these very specific training or capacity problems. Dr. Jared Sinclair: Um, that’s where we come and help them. So we’re, we’re a capacity building company. Uh, we have an advisory firm. We have several folks that we call on with the very [00:26:00] specific skill sets that we can bring to bear. On whatever those, whatever those problems are. So we focus predominantly on, on change management, leadership development. Dr. Jared Sinclair: Um, gap analysis and then closing those gaps, doing strategic planning, writing business plans for small businesses. Um, and then we have a very small niche of executive coaching where, you know, if somebody wants to continue on with this leadership development, um, or maybe it’s an executive that is in that startup phase, you know, have they have that person to go to that they can talk to and be like, Hey, let me run this problem by you. Dr. Jared Sinclair: Um, I’m trying to expand my capacity. What pointers do you have? So that’s what we do. Um, we started in 2017 and, uh, really cut our teeth working with nonprofits. I was in the government space for a long time. Um, did some time in the Marine Corps and then some time in the local government space, went back to grad school. Dr. Jared Sinclair: And, um, I just have a heart for nonprofits. Uh, and then I knew there was an educational gap there [00:27:00] to that knowledge gap, that K, right? Okay. In my own self where I hadn’t worked per se with businesses. So I started offering pro bono consulting for nonprofit organizations and my framework really started resonating with them. Dr. Jared Sinclair: We saw some good results. So from there we started kind of expanding out and um, that’s where we’re at now on the horizon. We’re, we’re looking at those bigger County, um, state and federal contracts. So we’re. We’re really submitting a lot of proposals in that space and trying to scale up, if you will, build our capacity in that realm. Dr. Jared Sinclair: So can you Chris Badgett: share like a fun story? I mean, of course, you don’t have to share names and company names or anything, but yeah, an example story from some of the work Dr. Jared Sinclair: you’ve done. Absolutely. Um, I think one of my one of my proudest stories was a nonprofit that we were working with and we were going through some strategic planning. Dr. Jared Sinclair: They were in the homelessness or poverty alleviation space. And [00:28:00] they weren’t quite organized. They were using borrowed space from schools and churches and whatnot. And we were able to go in, identify some gaps, write a strategic plan, kind of get things dialed in, write an operational plan for them. And this is obviously with ad hoc teams from that organization. Dr. Jared Sinclair: And, you know, there’s a little Not disbelief, but I guess doubt that these things would pan out and these things would work. Well, what happened, I got a phone call earlier this year and because of the structures and because of the organization that they put in place, they had a donor that came in and bought them their own building. Dr. Jared Sinclair: So now they’re in their own building. They’re not having to borrow space. They’re doing laundry service, shower service, employment services, computer labs, like all these things from their own space. So I would say that one for me is the most impactful. Because there was a little bit of doubt, but it shows that when you have the right people and the right systems and you have things in place, people will [00:29:00] recognize it and things will happen that you can’t even foresee. Dr. Jared Sinclair: So that one, that one was really fun for me and the team. Awesome. Chris Badgett: Yeah. Well, last question for you, Jared. Um, there’s a, this I guess would fall under the executive coaching realm. Uh, I see a lot of, or it’s a common problem in our space for course creators, coaches, even the people building agencies out there where they struggle with imposter syndrome. Chris Badgett: It manifests itself in the LMS space where. People buy software. They spend years like building something, but they never actually launched. And under a lot of that is imposter syndrome is buried in that. Do you have anything to help people that have admitted that, Hey, maybe I might be struggling with that. Chris Badgett: And who am I to teach X or I’m going to be judged as soon as I go live with this thing. Dr. Jared Sinclair: Yeah, I think we’ve, we’ve all been there and what a blessing if you go live with it and it fails. Yeah. Right. [00:30:00] Because what lessons. Yeah, what lessons are within that? And it gives you an opportunity to pivot something that hurts and it’s sticky. Dr. Jared Sinclair: So you won’t do it again. Um, I think, I think one of the things that I’ve done. Uh, with myself and then with some coaching clients is what I’ll do is I’ll, I’ll have them sit down and write down those things that they’re good at, right? So this week I want you to make just make a list in your phone Wherever you want to do it of all of those things that you’re good at all those things that you’ve done in your life Maybe those awards that you’ve received, you know playing soccer back when you were eight years old doesn’t matter like list everything And then come back a couple days later Refine that list. Dr. Jared Sinclair: Come back a couple days later. Refine that list. But what I want you to do this time is I want you to omit those things that you didn’t enjoy, right? So only circle those things that you enjoy. And then as this list kind of it starts out really big and people are like, what do I do? Can I put it on there? Dr. Jared Sinclair: No, I can’t put it. Just put everything on there. And then you go through it and you [00:31:00] circle those things that you enjoy. And then you revisit it sometime later, and what you’ll see is you’re going to see these trends of things that not only were you good at, but the things that you enjoyed, and then from there, it kind of, you can circle those things like, okay, what direction can I go with what I have with where I’m at? Dr. Jared Sinclair: And the next step is just to go, go do it. Whatever that is, if it’s creating an LMS or that first course, Uh, whether it’s on LinkedIn or Wix site or wherever on your platform, wherever it is, just go do it. Um, because the only way you’re going to get better is to do it. The last thing that you want to do, or that at least I want to do, is to be super great, more great than I am, looking back at my life and think, man, if I only took that step and did that, where would I be today? Dr. Jared Sinclair: Right? So just take that step, um, list all those things out, identify your strengths, identify what you like, and then identify those things that you can [00:32:00] do now and hopefully monetize. And then, um, take that next step. And when you’re in doubt, Just take the next logical step. You don’t need to take a giant step. Dr. Jared Sinclair: Um, just put one brick in the wall every day or every opportunity you have. And eventually you’ll have a giant building. Chris Badgett: Awesome. That’s Dr. Jared Sinclair. He’s at Sinclair performance. com. Any other ways for the people to connect with you, Dr. Jared Sinclair: Jared? Yeah. I’d love to connect with you on LinkedIn. If you look me up, it’s just Jared Sinclair. Dr. Jared Sinclair: Uh, we do have a YouTube channel. Uh, performance collective is what it’s called. Uh, I run a podcast as well. Just looking at leaders in various spaces. I think this last week I did a mom. You know, she’s a business owner and a mom. Um, and then I’ve got another one coming up, uh, for a gentleman in the tech space. Dr. Jared Sinclair: So I just like talking about leadership, but you can connect with us there on YouTube, LinkedIn, or if you want to reach out directly to me, it’s Jared J A R E D at Sinclair performance. com. I’d love to connect with you. [00:33:00] Awesome, Chris Badgett: Jared. Well, thanks for coming on the show, dropping the wisdom there. And I’d really encourage you out there listening or watching to go revisit the smack part of the episode. Chris Badgett: I think that’s a really powerful framework. Could you just, as we close it out here, say out what the letters mean again? Yeah, it’s Dr. Jared Sinclair: S M A C K, so it’s systems. Motivation, accountability, communications, and knowledge. If you go to our blog at Sinclair performance. com, there’s a short blog post that kind of dives a little bit into the smack framework. Chris Badgett: Thanks so much, Jared. We really appreciate it. Dr. Jared Sinclair: Yeah. Chris, thank you for having me on. I appreciate it. 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 at lifter lms. com forward slash gift. Go to lifter lms. com forward slash gift. Keep learning, [00:34:00] keep taking action and I’ll see you in the next episode. 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 at LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Go to LifterLMS. com forward slash 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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In this LMScast episode, Sandi Gauder from CMS Web Solution discusses the important subject of accessibility for online learning and website development. Sandi Gauder is an expert in online accessibility with over 15 years of experience. She is a web developer, trainer, and designer. Sandi adds that 15 to 20 percent of people are thought to have disabilities, highlighting the difficulty in obtaining reliable information on this demographic. The discussion explores many disability categories, including impairments related to vision, hearing, cognition, and mobility, and highlights the significance of developing inclusive digital experiences. In addition, Sandi discusses how COVID-19 has affected accessibility, pointing out that while there are more options for working and learning remotely, not all digital tools are accessible to everyone. 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: Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMS cast. I’m joined by a special guest. Her name is Sandi Gauder. She’s from CMS web solutions. com. Go check that out. We’re going to be talking about accessibility today for e learning, for website creation, and really just dive deep on the topic. Welcome to the show, Sandi. Sandi Gauder: Thanks Chris. Thanks for inviting me. Looking forward to it. Chris Badgett: I’m excited to, to get into it with you today. And not to put you on the spot, but do you know any, like kind of broad statistics around accessibility or people with disabilities, like, percentage of population or just any kind of big macro metrics to show people how big of an issue this is? Sandi Gauder: It’s, it’s a tough statistic to actually pin down because not everybody who has a disability will identify as having a disability. But in broad terms, we’re talking 15 to 20 percent of the population. So that could be somebody who’s blind, could be somebody who’s deaf could be somebody has learning disabilities, which is particularly important, obviously, for this context and the older we get, the less likely we’re going to say we have a disability, even though we probably do. So that’s why the numbers are so vague. Chris Badgett: There’s probably, I’m guessing, so correct me if I’m wrong, but I would assume that online learning and online working, perhaps like building websites as a job and things like that, may even have like a higher percentage because it’s Easier for people with disabilities to work from home or learn from home. Is there, do you know anything around that? What would you say? Sandi Gauder: I don’t have any statistics, but and yes certainly COVID made it easier for people to get into the workforce. Who may have probably predominantly a mobility disability because you’re talking about public or transit getting to and from work. The thing you have to keep in mind, though, is a lot of the tools that we use every day in the digital world aren’t necessarily. accessible. So just because we can work from home doesn’t mean that all of us are able to do that because the tools don’t always work for us. So I’d like to say that it’s opened up the world for people with disabilities for some probably, but definitely not for everybody. Chris Badgett: For, with a broad brushstroke, could you kind of paint the the disabilities that are out there? You mentioned like learning disabilities, mobility disabilities, like what are the main categories That we’re, we’re talking about here in terms of disability or challenges. Sandi Gauder: Sure. So I think the one that we think most often about is people with vision disabilities. So blind low sight, so people who are fully blind usually rely on a screen reader. They rely on that to read a web page to them or read a document or read everything to them. We’re a very visual Species. So that can be a difficult disability to try to provide alternatives for they also rely on the keyboard and not just people who are blind, but people who may have a disability. They are temporary disability. It’s the one thing we often forget. You break your dominant arm, you’re in a cast for six weeks, you can’t use a mouse, so you need to be able to use a keyboard to navigate through a site. Deaf or hard of hearing, so videos, audio, obviously is a challenge for them. So we need to provide transcripts or captions for videos. Cognitive disabilities is a really broad one. It could be memory issues. So if you’re doing any kind of testing in your learning materials, making sure they have time to kind of process things, giving reminders or cues along the way. It could be dyslexia. So reading can be difficult. And people with dyslexia and other learning disabilities will often use a screen reader just to support. The reading of a page kind of a thing. Mobility is beyond having a broken arm. It could be tremors. It could be being paralyzed and not being able to use a mouse. So there’s, there’s that as well. I am probably going to miss something. Even mental illness sometimes can have an impact on how we interact with the web sites that are very busy. Thank you. Or have a lot of things moving around all over the place can be really distracting and make it difficult for people who might have a learning disability or mental illness. It could be really overwhelming. So there’s all kinds of, there’s not one thing that you need to pay attention to. There’s all sorts of things. And one of the things we talk about in the field of accessibility is that what you do for a particular disability often supports people who don’t have a disability. And captions are a perfect example. Video captions, I mean, my husband and I will have captions on when we’re watching a British film, because we don’t understand, even though they’re speaking the same language, I can’t understand Scotch. I mean, they’re, they’re just like really difficult. So those captions benefit people who can’t hear it, but they also benefit people who can’t. understand a dialect, for example. So it’s, I think sometimes we focus on just the people with the disability and forget that it’s actually improving things for all of us along the way. Chris Badgett: You mentioned earlier that some people don’t identify as disabled. And I know myself, like several years ago. I had some back injuries from a long career off offline doing manual work. And I was at a physical personal or physical trainer, physical therapy. And they. They’d like did the scoring and they’re like, you’re disabled. And I’m like, I didn’t know that. And then luckily for me, I was able to work through it and do the stuff and figure it out and get past that that categorization or whatever. But can you tell us more about people with disabilities that may not identify? Sandi Gauder: It could be people who have struggled with learning, struggled with school for all these years and have never been diagnosed as having a learning disability. So they, they maybe have developed other coping mechanisms but they don’t necessarily say, Oh yeah, I I’m, I’m disabled. I must be disabled. That must be why I’ve struggled with school all these years. Older people are probably the biggest group that don’t like to say I’m disabled. They you know, we all lose our hearing as we get older, we lose our eyesight, we lose our mobility, we lose our ability to focus even the older we get. And those are all forms of a disability that might be early stages, but They just, there’s a stigma attached to saying I have a disability. I think some of it could be because society doesn’t still know what to do about it. Or how to interact with somebody who has a disability. I think there are a small group. I don’t think it’s going to add a tremendous number to the overall statistics. But there are still people out there who maybe haven’t been diagnosed or just aren’t willing to accept it. They don’t want that label attached to themselves. Chris Badgett: So I’m from LifterLMS and LMS learning management system LMS. We have a lot of three letter acronyms and I wanted to and we get asked a lot just in terms of features of the software, building websites and things like that about A. D. A. Then WCAG, can you explain what those are in place for and what those are Sandi Gauder: all about? So the ADA A is the, and I’m gonna get this wrong because I’m Canadian, but American for Disabilities Act. Yes, I got that. Right. And W Hager, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines in Ontario, which is the province I’m in, we have another acronym. Acronym. We have A ODA, which the is the Ontario. Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act and then Europe has their EN 301549 which, so we love acronyms, but all these, these guidelines really come together and WCAG is probably the baseline for everything. It’s a set of guidelines that were developed by the World Wide Web Consortium, W3C, and they help. Developers and content creators create accessible content. They are guidelines. They’re black and white. You either pass or you fail. But they help us create materials that are accessible. So there’s a guideline that talks about colour contrast. So making sure there’s enough contrast between the text and the background. And that helps people who have low vision. It helps. A lot of men who are colorblind and those stats are like 1 in 7, 1 in 12 men are colorblind, which means they have a tough time distinguishing between colors on a web page. So these guidelines and these laws like the ADA and the AODA. Are trying to compel organizations to make their content accessible for everybody regardless of whether they have disability or not. And each jurisdiction has different ways of approaching it. The ADA is more around organizations that provide services to the government. Our legislation in Ontario is there’s different requirements for public organizations. So government, that kind of thing and private around making things accessible and they go beyond even the digital realm. They do cover things like transportation, education. Employment, those kinds of things. So they all come back to trying to go through steps and processes to make content accessible, to make tools accessible, learning tools, websites even some of the regulations cover things like making sure that you can use Microsoft Word if you need to. So it’s, those are what the all the different legislation applies to is, is, Making things accessible for as many people as possible. Chris Badgett: The, the journey to make a website accessible. We were just talking before we hit record about this. What another ad I could do to the podcast to make the captioning work better with the transcripts we already have. It’s always, for me, it’s, it’s always been a journey of continuous improvement for our websites and our software. And for some, I think it’s important just to start like, so if we look at, at website content specifically. Where, what are some of the first things we can do to adopt accessibility best practices as we build out websites and specifically e learning websites? Sandi Gauder: So there’s two parts to it, I think, and I’m a developer by trade, so I’m the one that usually is building a WordPress theme or building out a site for a client. And. In the digital world, it’s often thought that it’s my responsibility to solve all problems. And yes, to a certain extent, I do that. But a big part of it is content. So, I guess, to answer your question, it kind of depends on what your role is around the website. So, as a developer I can start by making sure there’s focus around every interactive element as. I tap through a website As a content creator, somebody creating content, like learning material I need to make sure that I’m using proper heading structure in my content, that I’m adding captions to videos, or providing transcripts to audio using things like plain language even, it’s not necessarily a requirement under most of these under most of the legislation, but Using plain language, making content easy to read and digest is helpful for everybody. So, I think the first thing, well, I know the first thing I do every time I land on a website is put my mouse away and try to tab through it with my keyboard. And if I can figure out where I am on a website, then I’m in a pretty good place. So, I think that that is one of the first things that the developers can do. I think content creators, the first thing they can do is start using proper heading structure. It’s just like a textbook, make it easy for me to read. And. Using alternative text for images. If you’re going to use an image, describe it. If I can’t see the image, tell me what it’s about don’t write a novel. People like to write novels, just like a sentence or two to say you know, it’s a gentleman wearing a headset in front of a whiteboard with his LifterLMS logo in the background. I mean, that’s enough. That tells me that the picture of you is this guy on a screen. Where he’s standing and even those little things can have a huge impact, especially for somebody who can’t see and is relying on a screen reader. Yeah. Sorry. We talked about, you talked about continuous improvement. We talk about progress over perfection and it’s just starting. Like you’re absolutely right. Just pick one thing and fix it and then move on to the next one. Chris Badgett: Yeah. Like adding transcripts and AI can now help create those more easily and affordably and for free essentially. Yeah. Do you have any accessibility like WordPress specific like plugins you like or what, or, or like what’s the lay of the land for, is there, we can like manually go through our media library and add alternative text, which is a great project just to commit to and take a day to do, especially if you have a large website, it might take you a while to get through the images. Is there any tooling that can help us get results faster or add accessibility on top or at least help uncover what our accessibility problems are? Sandi Gauder: Well, there’s tools that are not specific even to WordPress. I mean, there are automated checking tools. My favorite is a browser extension that works on Chrome, Firefox. Edge that’s called Wave. It’s from an organization called WebAims University in Utah. And this browser extension is you press a button and it gives you everything you need to know about what’s rendered on the page. So. Have you got good color contrast? Have you got proper heading structure? Do you have alternative text? Like it will do the very quick high level manual check that points out all the issues that are happening both on the code side and on the content side. So it’s a great tool for, for both sides of the equation to use. It’s not going to solve or catch everything, but it will. I like to think of it as the low hanging fruit. If you can get your heading structure fixed pretty quickly, then do it. If you can identify images that need alternative text, then do it. Things like color contrast can be tricky to deal with quickly. Usually colors are tied into branding, logos, all that kind of stuff. And if you’re color combinations. That you currently have aren’t accessible or provide good color contrast and you might be into a full on branding exercise. So that’s the kind of thing that even though tools can pick it up. It’s a long term fix. So it’s those tools are excellent. I can certainly after the, we wrap up today, send you some quick ones just if you want to post. For your, your listeners, just to get them started. It’s and the keyboard, it really is. And it’s free. It’s right in front of you all the time. It’s one of the best tools for checking whether your site’s accessible. Chris Badgett: I noticed on social media a lot, just to dig in a little bit on the color contrast one. Something people will often say is like, Oh, this button is not accessible. Like the call to action button or whatever. And if you could catch somebody at the beginning of a project before the, the branding and the color palette or whatever is picked, are there any tips you have on maybe with a button specifically, like the text and the color of the, on the button and the button color itself, or what. What are just some general rules of thumb for a good color palette that’s accessible? Sandi Gauder: Well, the contrast rate, what we’re trying to get to is 4. 5 to 1. That’s the ratio. That’s the magic number of color contrast. If your font size is huge, then that contrast ratio drops down, but for most things, like a button, the call to action button, as long as there’s a difference between background and foreground of 4. 5 to 1, then you’re good. There’s, people often ask, well, is there an accessible color palette? Not there’s not one. I mean, black and yellow is often used because they really offer good contrast, but your colors. I mean, you’ve got blue and white, I don’t know if it’s it’s meets the color contrast. But if it doesn’t, then you throw in a 3rd color. That does that’s part of your branding. So you just find a way to get that mix to make it work. I think that. Having a big enough font is also helpful. You don’t see it so much now used to be like the cool hip thing to do to have light gray font on a slightly darker gray background because it’s always so cool. But most of us couldn’t read that stuff unless you were like 20 years old with excellent vision. You were not reading it. So I think we’ve shifted away from that kind of design to things that are much clearer and easier to read. I think we’re I think. Unconsciously, we’re getting better at this, I think that we recognize that clean design works. So, I think it’s, you know, we have this telecommunications company in Canada. It’s huge. And their branding is You see an ad from this company and you know which brand it is, but their fonts, their colors were completely inaccessible. They use the thinnest, thinnest font you could find. And it’s great. I’m going to. Give away who it is, but they have these two colors green and purple that they use that were horrible for color contrast and hard to read and they committed to accessibility and it’s I don’t know if they’ve completed the process, but it’s a multi year project to to slightly and slowly adjust things so that. Us consumers don’t really realize that they’ve changed it. And it’s so much easier to read. So the, this, this whole idea of colors and your call to action button, it really is tied into branding and just like anything with accessibility, the sooner you start in the process, the more likely you’re going to make something that’s accessible and easier it is to adjust and adapt. As you go through a project, I mean, it’s it’s really tough to go backwards and fix it. Chris Badgett: Do you have any, like you mentioned the font size, bigger font, legible, fatter, maybe, is there like a font size minimum that you like to see, like 16, 18, something like that? 16 is good. Sandi Gauder: 16. Anybody who needs larger will. They’ll either have it in their operating system settings, they’ll set things to a larger size, or if they are going to a website, they’ll just bump up the font size so that they can read it. But 16 is a pretty, pretty good place to start at, for sure. Anything smaller, oof, too tiny. Chris Badgett: Two kind of sidestreams and I’ll just pitch them both to you at the same time. Is there anything to consider for accessibility for SEO? And then the other would be just around AI and accessibility in terms of maybe prompting so that you get a more accessible output or something like that. So, sorry, those are two different questions at once. Sandi Gauder: But so the SEO one I talked earlier about heading structure. I talked about alternative text search engines, all that stuff. They love meaningful link text. You know, how often have you gone to a page that says click here, click here, click here, or read more, read more, read more. And you have 10 of them on a page for screen reader user. It’s. useless because what’s one click here from another. If you wrap that in sign up for a course now Google’s going to find that too. And Google’s going to say, Oh, that’s a meaningful link. Up you go in the search engine results. Google likes proper heading structure, Google likes alternative text. Google pays attention to this stuff. And it used to be said that Google was the biggest screen reader user on the planet, which probably is because it’s basically digesting text. So it’s, Yes, they, they go together. Well what we sometimes see, though, is people abusing things like alternative text to stuff keywords in for that search engine bump. But that’s not the intent. Describe the image. Don’t take advantage of accessibility to. Optimize for search engines, they go together really, really well. If you do accessibility, well, search engines are going to be happy with you. Also, I, I, my partner in crime. It’s just totally obsessed with a, I could probably better answer this question than I can. But there’s a couple of things around AI that I would talk about. First of all, there are these things called overlays, accessibility overlays. You probably see them more often than you realize. There’s usually in the bottom right or left corner of a web page, you’ll see that accessibility icon, the, the, that body that’s, I don’t know. You’d recognize it if you saw it. And if you click on that or hit it, it will open up this, what looks like a tool that is going to make an inaccessible website accessible. And that’s all being done with artificial intelligence. They’ve been around for 2 or 3 years and they are. One of the worst things to happen to the world of accessibility, they interfere with all sorts of assistive technology. They don’t make it a website accessible. They more often than not make it worse. So from that front, AI is not so great. What AI can be really good at is if you’re modifying your content, if you’re trying to turn it into something that If you use the right prompt with something like chat GBT and say make this text easier to read with plain language or add headings to it it can help you get there. It can help you want to go. Take some of that workload away from you so that you’ve got something to start from just like the transcripts that get auto generated from audio and video recordings, you can get them auto generated, they’re a start, they’re not going to be perfect, but they’ve done a lot of the work for you, and that’s artificial intelligence we’re not yet at the stage where artificial intelligence can fix things when it comes to accessibility, they can Can recommend how you do something. Or they can be a tool to help you with content, especially. But we’re not there yet. Just like just about everything else with a we’re getting there, but we’re not there yet. You can’t rely on them. Chris Badgett: Digging into e learning specifically, how can we as instructors or coaches, teachers create more accessible quizzes and assignments? Like if we’re teaching something like for example, like in an online quiz, there’s things like picture choice or there’s upload a, an essay or fill in the blank. And maybe we’re doing something. where we want people to speak something like language learning or whatever. There’s like a lot of different types of quizzing and assignments, but how do we get accessibility in our brain when we’re creating those things to make sure they’re usable by all? Sandi Gauder: Yeah, that’s, that’s a tricky one. I don’t think we’re going to make everything accessible to everybody. So there’s a couple of ways to think about it. The simpler the testing or the assessment is, the better likely you’re going to be making something accessible. So simplifying language, providing really clear instructions at the beginning, using bullet points, even in those instructions it’s easier to read bullet points than a massive paragraph of text. For those image quizzes, making sure you’ve got alternative text that is descriptive enough that someone using a screen reader will be able to determine what the difference is between all these pictures. Writing essays, that’s, you know, just making sure that the upload process is easy for everybody. They can access it with a keyboard essentially. Can they do that? The, and this kind of ties in with universal design for learning, which is a concept that talks about making sure that learning is. Works for everybody. We’re all different learners. We all learn differently. Some of us are visual learners. Some of us are tactile. We need to do the thing. So providing different ways to assess students, especially if it’s for grading purposes can be really helpful. So, instead of making it an essay assignment, you give upload a PowerPoint. Instead of writing an essay, I mean, obviously, it depends on on the point of the assignment. If the essay is about writing some short story, then obviously you need it in an essay format, but giving learners the opportunity to evaluate their understanding in the way that works for them. We become sometimes as educators a bit too rigid about stuff, and we have to become a little bit more flexible, and that ties in nicely with accessibility. If I don’t have the tools to write an essay, but I have the tools that. Let me create a video then let me create the video and upload that. If that’s accessible, more accessible for me than writing, then sure. Why not? Chris Badgett: Do you have any stories and this is a blanket statement, but about how like an online education platform creator could learn from some accessibility wins that happen at in person schools, is there something that we overlook often in the online? Space that like schools are, let’s say a really good school with a lot of accessibility that we could learn from Sandi Gauder: that is a good question. And I’m not sure I’ve got an answer for that one. I, you know, I used to teach online. I used to teach accessible web development for a college up here in Canada. And we did it. It was a year long program. I did one piece of it and we did it online before covid. And then obviously during covid online learning is definitely a different way of teaching and learning. It’s much harder to get students engaged. And, it’s if you can’t get them to become a team. I mean, I had probably five cohorts that I taught over the years and I discovered that the students that actually created their own community offline or outside of the course were more engaged in the learning. During lecture time they seem to support each other better. They were more engaged in actually listening and learning when I was at the front of the room, so to speak. So I think. If there’s a way to create that community in an online environment, I think that’s the one thing that gets lost from in person to going online. It’s getting people to connect with each other, and then connect with the person who’s trying to do the teaching. And it’s just like before we came online, you know, you talked about podcasting is easier than writing and you like the collaborative learning part of it. And that’s exactly it. I think that’s exactly what I’m talking about. It’s so much more engaging to have conversations with people than it is to just stare at a screen for an hour. We get so much from. Listening and asking questions and talking to each other so much more than you can ever get from something that’s very flat and one way. So I think if there’s a way to include that kind of community building within your courses, I think that can really make a big difference. And it can it makes everybody feel kind of connected and feels like they all matter if they can all interact with each other. Especially there are people in the group who have a disability and are willing to be open about it. And. One of the things around accessibility is that we’re, we’re still kind of scared of people with a disability. We don’t know what to do, we don’t know what. And we don’t want to say the wrong thing. We don’t want to offend anybody. We want to make sure we’re being, you know, politically correct or whatever it is. But the more time we spend with people who actually have a disability the more comfortable we become and then we actually all learn better from each other as well. I don’t know if that answered your question or not. That was that was a tough question. Kudos to you. Chris Badgett: What’s your story, Sandy? Like, how did you end up with this focus on accessibility and web development? Sandi Gauder: Yeah, it kind of random. I mean, I I’m of an age that I went to school before there was this thing called the internet. So I had many careers prior to this. I was in customer service, I was in human resources. I did a lot of recruiting. Happened and my husband and I, who I’m in business with said, you know what, the world’s getting kind of odd and we need to control our future. And we both quit our jobs at the same time. I don’t know what we were thinking and started this business. And we started as a, just a broad marketing company. And one of the Clients we were consulting had this proprietary, proprietary content management system. I had done some coding in high school and university. So it seems like a fit. We took it on started building websites with this content management system integrated into it. That system went by the wayside and we moved to WordPress as content management system. Because. It only made sense. Somewhere along the way, a colleague who was delivering courses around the AODA legislation in this province of Ontario said, you know, you need to get into this accessibility thing. And it’s like, well, I don’t know what this is. What are you talking about? And the more we read, the more we said, this is the an obvious fit. The internet is intended for everybody to use. So why wouldn’t we want to build websites that are accessible for everybody to use? So that’s what we did. We continued using WordPress. We build custom themes that are accessible. And then somewhere along the way, somebody said, Hey, do you want to teach in this new program about accessible web development? And that’s how I got into formal education. So it’s, it’s a bit of a hopscotch kind of journey, but I wouldn’t change it. It’s, it’s an amazing people that work in the accessibility field tend to be really super nice people. They’re caring, they want to make the world a better place. I mean, that’s fundamentally what we try to do. We want to make it equitable for everybody. So you tend to find a lot of really nice people, really dedicated people in this field. So it’s hard to leave it. Chris Badgett: Tell us more about your business. CMS web solutions. com. I like that domain name, by the way. Good job with that one. Yeah. What, what’s your ideal client? Like, tell us more about the work you do over there. Sandi Gauder: So as I mentioned, we’re web development, WordPress web development, accessible WordPress web development. And so and we’re kind of in this transition phase where we still build websites for clients using WordPress but we’re also getting more into education, teaching teachers and educators how to do things in an accessible fashion. So our, our ideal client on the website is usually small to medium sized business or organization that wants accessibility, not because they have to, but because they want accessibility. And so that has shifted over the years. We’ve found that if we work with clients who want it for the check mark, they’re not usually as. It goes by the wait side pretty quickly. If they’re not committed to it on the training side, it’s organizations that want to learn how to make their education materials more accessible and open to all. So, that can be small business, could be larger institutions. It’s, it’s, but they have to be committed to accessibility. I think that’s, that’s the underlying thing for us. It’s become very clear that we would like working with organizations that are committed to it. And not because of the check Mark. Chris Badgett: Awesome. Well, that’s Sandy Gowder from CMSwebsolutions. com. Is there any final words you have for the people before we go today? Sandi Gauder: Well, it’s, it’s progress over perfection. Use your keyboard. One step at a time. You don’t need to be perfect off the get go. It’s a journey. It really is. It’s just start, just pick something and start. Chris Badgett: Thanks for coming on the show, Sandy. We really appreciate it. Sandi Gauder: Thank you for having me. It’s been great. 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 at LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Go to LifterLMS. com forward slash 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 Make eLearning Websites with Accessibility with Sandi Gauder appeared first on LMScast.

In this LMScast episode, Nick Usborne delves into the deep effects of emotional intelligence and AI on successful communication, with a focus on course building and copywriting. Nick Usborne is a seasoned copywriter, author, and consultant with a career spanning back to 1979. His website is nickusbrone.com. He fell in love with copywriting and finally started working for big businesses. After making the switch to an internet company in 1997, Nick started advising startups and was in high demand as a conference speaker. Nick highlights self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management as the four key categories that comprise emotional intelligence. He emphasizes how important emotional intelligence is in creating trust, which is a necessary condition for both profitable sales and enduring client relationships. Additionally, he talks about the differences between manipulative strategies and ethical, emotionally intelligent copywriting, arguing in favor of an authentic, listener-focused strategy. 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 Badgett. I’m the co founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to 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. He’s a repeat guest on the show. He’s my friend and colleague, Nick Usborne. You can find him over at nickusborne. com. Nick is the creator of his later latest course, which is future proof copywriting course. Combining artificial intelligence with the power of emotional intelligence. Nick is an awesome writer, copywriter, course creator, teacher. Nick has done copywriting for big brands like Apple. The New York Times, the United States Navy. He shared the stage at marketing conferences with folks like Seth Godin. I’m lucky to consider Nick a friend. Welcome back on the show, Nick. Nick Usborne: Thank you. Thank you for the generous introduction. You make me sound good. Chris Badgett: Absolutely. So Nick is a prolific curiosity person. And when he goes deep on things like AI and writing, I pay attention. Let’s start by unpacking. We’ve all heard a lot about artificial intelligence, which we’re going to talk about and how to use that in our writing, but before we go there. Let’s unpack what emotional intelligence is. Nick Usborne: Emotional intelligence. So I think a lot of us when we were kids took, it took a standard intelligence test. This is the kind of cognitive intelligence test. And it’s horrible because as a young age, you’re told whether you’re smart or dumb or whatever. And the thing about the cognitive intelligence is it doesn’t really change in during life, but for a long time, there’s been this sense that. Is this really the only measure of someone’s potential success or achievements in life is what their cognitive intelligence is? And an author called Daniel, Dan Goldman in the 90s. In 1995, he wrote the book Emotional Intelligence. And he argued that, you know what? It’s not so much about the cognitive intelligence. If you look at the most successful people in. In business and entrepreneurs and, within the families, it’s not about the cognitive intelligence. It’s about the emotional intelligence. And he, if you don’t mind me rambling, all right, to set it up, he basically broke this down into four domains, the self awareness of your own emotional state. So you may have a look, Chris, you and I could get into a discussion and one of us gets heated. And you say to me, I’ll nick it. You sound angry and I said, No, I don’t. Or he said, You’re angry. No, I’m not. Nick, you’re upset. No, I’m not. And maybe I am upset, but I don’t recognize it. We think we automatically understand that we’re self aware about our emotional state. Very often we’re not. Nick, you’re really stressed. No, I’m not. Actually I am. So, self awareness is part of this process. And then self management, which is how do you actually then manage the emotions you feel? So if I go into my, my kids are too old now, but there was a time where I had some teenage sons and I’d go into their bedroom and they’d be sitting there smoking a cigarette in bed or worse, and the place would be a dump. And I’d be, and I know that my first reaction is to be frustrated and angry. Ah, come on. But I also know, so self management is for me to recognize that emotion that I’m going to feel because I because there it is. I’ve been there. We’ve been there before, but I could have now self manage and say, okay, take a breath. We know that it never turns out well if you just get angry with the teenager because the teenager always wins when it comes to getting angry. So now I’ve got to manage my emotions. So that is something, hey, this is a big part of like emotional maturity is how well Some people say, Oh I feel this way. Therefore, I’m going to shout and scream at you. Okay, but there’s maybe there’s more emotionally intelligent ways to go about it, which is sometimes to manage those emotions to get to a better outcome. The third was he talks about social awareness, and this is a really interesting and difficult one, I think, and that is with other people. If I’m talking to a group of three people, how aware am I, how tuned in am I into their emotions? What, how empathetic am I being? So empathy is a big part of social awareness is like and, I’m honestly, I’m not terribly good at this as like reading. Sometimes what I’ll do is I’ll have a conversation and then like an hour later or a day later, or three days later, I think, Oh my goodness, that person, the one on the right that I didn’t know, there was almost like an expression or a micro expression that I can see now, but I didn’t see at the time. And what I was saying. upset insulted that person and I didn’t get it. I was not aware of other people’s emotions around me. So it’s, super hard. That part of emotional intelligence is to be not just empathetic, which I think we’d like to think that we’re empathetic, that because it’s a nice thing to be, but actually to be aware of the emotions of people around us. So Daniel Goleman wrote about this from A lot of it about it from a personal point of view and other people, other experts have picked it up since then, and he has to and applying this to business of like emotional intelligence within managers and leaders and teams like, how self aware is your boss? How well does she manage her emotions when things go south a bit? How, aware is she of People’s someone’s had a terrible day and goes in to see the boss. Does the boss even notice? Does she aware that person’s having a really hard day or does she just. And it’s the same with writing. We can be a big part of copywriting, which is my core skill. I’ve been a copywriter for over 40 years is before I put pen to paper, old school pen to paper before I put pen to paper, I’ve got to pause and think, who am I writing to? Who is my audience? And also what is their emotional state? How am I going to make them feel good? All right, I want to take a layer of amygdala and make them feel good. And if I can get them to feel good, then I’m 80 90 percent of the way to making it a sale. The other thing about emotional intelligence is it builds trust. And trust is a kind of precursor to making a sale. And for us, like Chris said, I am a course creator myself, so I’m a copywriter. But I’m also a course creator, and I know that when I am writing promotions to sell my courses, I have to find a way to get my reader to trust me. They’re going to put money down. They don’t see, they don’t get to take the course. They may get a sample or something. Over to, and maybe I’m not going to do it in one shot, maybe I can get him to sign up for my newsletter and step by step, I will build trust. And if I want to build trust, it means that I have to be emotionally intelligent. I cannot just keep bombarding them with 10, 20 percent off, 10 percent off, 5 percent off rush, I can’t do the same old all the time. I’m not saying that doesn’t work. It does. We, I think we all know that, but longer term, if I want to build a relationship with, a buyer and maybe have them buy a second course or a third course, is I got to build trust. And that’s where emotional intelligence is, a superpower. And then no, you go ahead. Otherwise I’ll just talk forever Chris Badgett: about it. A side question related to this sometimes for somebody who’s not a marketer or a copywriter those, things have a bad rap. How would you differentiate Healthy emotional intelligence in your communication and your writing specifically compared to what some people fear of manipulation or being a pushy salesperson where you’re, trying to make them feel good, but it’s not necessarily authentic or whatever. So how, do you, what’s the difference there that makes great ethical, emotionally intelligent copywriting versus manipulation? Nick Usborne: I think it actually comes from the writer. It’s a mindset thing. I know how to, like I said, I’ve been doing this forever so, I know how to do the manipulation thing the rush hurry, the fear fear of missing out, the fear of losing your money, the fear of, and yeah, I can I, can do that, but it, but I know it’s manipulative, and I know that I can make some dollars that way, but I don’t think it’s a good way to build a longer term relationship, yet. Because it’s in any realm in life to build a relationship based on emotional manipulation is probably not a winning strategy, whether it’s at home or at work. And I know some companies follow that route. But again if I’m a bigger company and I follow that route. Okay. It’s, the company’s reputation on the line, but for those of us who are selling courses, programs, training more one on one hi, I’m Nick. I’m Chris. This is me. The stakes are a little different. I can’t really afford to be seen to be manipulative because my brand has got to be trustworthy. Because this is me. If you go to my website, look, this is me. You’ll see me on my website. My brand is me. And yes, I can do the manipulative, emotional stuff. I know how to do it and how to pull those triggers. But what does that say about me as a brand? Because when you get to the website, next time you’re thinking of buying one of my courses, it’s it’s either, Oh, that’s Nick. Hey he really seems like the real deal. He seems like a good, generous guy. Or I look, it’s Nick, the manipulative copywriter. And, I don’t want to beat the second one. I want to be the first one. That’s how a business endures in the long term, even with even for a small scale businesses. Chris Badgett: Let’s talk about places where somebody could use emotionally intelligent copywriting as a course creator. I think the obvious thing is the sales page, but where can we and we can accelerate with AI and get new more blended in with that. But before we go to AI, where can we use this emotional, emotionally intelligent copywriting as a course creator, coach or training provider besides our sales pages? Nick Usborne: I for me, my personal experience with this is probably 90 percent of that work has been done with my newsletter. All right, so I’ll build a relationship with people are stutter. And hey, if you go to my website, you’ll find you’re invited to sign up for my newsletter, you get a free report, all the good stuff. And then I will start. Sending you emails once or twice a week. And that is my opportunity to show myself as I truly am because email and newsletters are like that. If I’m doing social media, if I’m doing a landing page, it’s web marketing stuff. If you give me permission to talk to you in your inbox is a private is you own your inbox, right? It’s the one thing in this domain. Like, Zuckerberg owns everything you do on Facebook. Google owns everything you do when you’re browsing. Everyone else owns everything, but you own your inbox. It’s your place. And if you don’t like what I say, you can unsubscribe or you can mark me as spam. So it’s a place where one, I have to be careful not to get thrown out, but it also is a place where I have the best opportunity to speak to you, write to you, like pretty much one on one because friends and family will write to you in, email. It’s not just a business application. It’s a personal space as well. So if I respect that space, if I respect the fact that this is your personal space, and I that is where I have the opportunity, however well or poorly I might do it, but I have the opportunity now to build a relationship. So one of my favorite writers is Anne Handley. of marketing profs. And if you get her newsletter, she does this fantastic job of building a relationship with her reader. In fact, just, you just read the first, you just read one newsletter from out Handley and you feel like she really is your friend, which is impossible because it’s the first newsletter, but the way she writes. It just feels that way that she cares about you, that she sees you, that she’s writing to you. So that has always been for me, the killer app is either through email or newsletters come into the inbox as well through newsletter is there is where I can speak. I can speak honestly and I can try to demonstrate a high level of emotional intelligence and also simple, things like every now and again I’ll say, Hey, I want to hear what you get. I want to hear what you think. I’ve just done a super quick survey. Just let me know what you think. So I’m listening. All right. So, listening is key to empathy. It’s key to emotional intelligence. It’s something a lot of us don’t do as well as we should. We love talking much. Listen to me. I can’t stop. We love talking. But we’re not most of us are not so good at listening. So I’ll just do Something like I’ll throw in a quick two question survey one because I’m really interested in the answers. But secondly, it lets my readers know that, hey, it’s not just Nick broadcasting. He actually wants to hear. He wants feedback from us. So that’s cool. Chris Badgett: Awesome. Your course is future proof, copywriting, combining artificial intelligence with the power of emotional intelligence. That’s over at nickusborne. com. There’s a coupon code Lifter15 if you want 15 percent off. Tell us about the course and start bringing AI into the conversation. So you’ve always been a very talented, emotionally intelligent copywriter yourself. AI came on the scene really strongly a year ago of this recording or so. What have you discovered when combining your emotionally intelligent brain with the large language models of artificial intelligence? Nick Usborne: So many things but you’re right. Like whenever dangle a new technology in front of me and it’s irresistible, like I’m just like down the rabbit hole and I see everyone in the comments that James Burchill is there and he knows, cause we’ve fallen down one or two mutual rabbit holes over the years. So when it came out, Hey, I’ve been using with, James Burchill, we were using official intelligence in chatbots like many years ago. It’s been around for a while. I’ve been into it for quite a while. And then along comes GPT, chat GPT at the end of November of last year. And, I’d been using some other tools, like literally the week before that tool comes out and it like completely blows my mind because literally it felt like 10 years of development had been. Passed over the course of a weekend. It honestly felt like that to me. It was extraordinary, that leap. And, we know that to be true. ’cause in fact, everything that’s happened since last November, it is almost defined by that moment and, chat. GBT and g BT four are, still almost the benchmark. These are the LLMs to beat right now. As always, I jumped in because I was fascinated and amazed. And I discovered some ways as a copywriter that I could, really use it to my advantage. I could use it, I used it for brainstorming. And, I used it for research. I used it for outlining presentations. And I used it for ideas. People really struggle with the idea that these A. I. S. might, in some sense, be creative, but I have found them to be creative and that I can throw two things in and it’s a mash up and they’ll spit something out that I hadn’t thought of or anticipated. I think, huh. They took these two things and they created suggested something new that to me is, an act of creation. So I found that absolutely fascinating because I never anticipated that from a tool like this. So as a copywriter, say I could brainstorm stuff, I could research stuff, I could outline stuff. I could do some first drafts of stuff I could do early on and I was doing these, I experimented with something. I went to and I have one or two books up on Amazon. And I went naturally on this, I didn’t do my stuff. It was a product. I went to a product on Amazon. It was like a food blender and I copied like 50 reviews, consumer reviews, and I pasted them into GPT for, and I said, Hey, based on the, these reviews, give me a sentiment analysis of this product. And it’s like one, two, three, boom. And it’s like insane. You know how hard it is to take 50 or 100 pieces of written reviews and try and hold those in your mind and say, okay, hang on, what are the positives? What are the negatives, what are the proportions? What are the main points? And it just like 30 seconds later, I have it. There are companies I could go to, to do sentiment analysis, but it would cost me thousands of dollars and weeks or months. Then I said, okay, give me identify the words and phrases that predominated on the positive side of the sentiment. And it did, and then I said, okay, based on the sentiment analysis. Based on the kind of emotionally triggering vocabulary we’ve identified, write me a sales page for this product. It did. And I’m sitting there thinking this is like insane. Particularly the sentiment analysis part of it. So, as a copywriter, I’m beginning to look at this and I’m looking at it and looking at it and I’m seeing all the potential. Meanwhile, I’m watching the market like of copywriters. So copywriters, content writers, SEO writers, all that kind of digital writing, my digital writing colleagues out there, there’s one block. They’re saying, Oh, no, I’m not even looking at AI. I think it’s just a passing fad. It’s all hype. It’ll never come to anything. And that’s actually, I find it in a sense, discouraging. That’s a larger block than I might have anticipated because I’ve done surveys on this design group. And then there’s the group that a little bit worried that this might eat their lunch one day. So my, whole Positioning on this is like lean into this. You cannot ignore this. This is way too powerful to ignore. If you ignore this, you will, you’ll be done. Because in fact, I I’ve asked, and again you have to, revise, you have to prompt and then reprompt and sometimes revise that prompt. But if you work hard enough at it, you can get a good You can get if you’re writing a 5, 500 word blog post with a bit of work you can get a really good piece of writing and I’ve hired other writers as well as being a writer myself. And I can probably, I can get output from GPT four. That is pretty close to as good as what I get from most human writers, as long as I take care with the prompting. There’s a potential problem there. And low level writers that have been pumping out stuff very fast at volume without really caring about the quality. They’re already being replaced by these tools. And in a sense, yeah, because what you’re doing is low quality and these tools are already better than you. So yeah it’s, a, it is a potential threat to all of us in the creative space, the commercial creative space. So to my mind, the way to deal with that one is to lean into it so that you maximize your use of it. It makes you more productive. It makes you smarter. But the second bit getting into the emotional intelligence is okay. If I want to beat this thing, if I want to stand, not beat it so much, but if I want to separate myself from just another AI writer, because there’s already a gazillion of those, how do I do that while I add in the emotional intelligence, because if you ask chat, GPT say, Hey, chat, GPT, what are your limitations when it comes to selling or writing stuff for humans? And it’ll say. We don’t really, I don’t really do empathy. I don’t have firsthand experience of emotions. I don’t get. Cultural nuances or regional nuances. There’s all kinds of subtleties and it’s all within the emotional scale. There are these subtleties that I don’t get because I doesn’t get it. It can read. It can read a story or a poem or a screenplay about emotion, but it can’t. It’s never didn’t have a story. It can’t tell you the story of when it was a teenager in the pub and it saw this girl across the room for the very first time. It can’t have that experience. So that’s why I blend. artificial intelligence with emotional intelligence, because one, it makes the copy better, because emotion always makes copy better. But also now I’m adding something in that AI cannot add it, because it doesn’t have that sophisticated, doesn’t have that first hand experience. It’s never tasted ice cream, it’s never fallen in love, it’s never stubbed his toe. So, I’ll bring into my copy more sensory things Smell or taste or hearing being on the beach and feeling the sound between your toes and smelling the salt and hearing the wind and all this stuff that I can’t do, but I can so yeah, and then another thing. And again, just interrupt me because I just go on forever. Is if too many people just use AI. There is this sameness trap, there’s this kind of paradox, is that if you just use AI for your output guess what? There’s a gazillion other copywriters doing the same, and you’re going to start sounding very, similar to everyone else. So as a company, why would I hire you if you sound the same as everyone else? And also there are some companies that I think have jumped on the bandwagon a little bit quickly and using they’re firing some of the human writers and perhaps leaning too heavily into AI with the result that their brands are beginning to sound a little bit like everyone else’s they’re competing brands. So you’ve got to be really careful this differentiation, because AI tends to, this is this kind of paradox with AI is that it’s amazing and it’s creative and it’s incredibly productive, but there’s, you get the sameness trap. And so again, as a copywriter with emotional intelligence, I come in and say, Hey, I can disrupt that. I can make you sound unique. I can make you sound, we can use all the benefits of AI, but by weaving in emotional intelligence, I would not only make your copy better, but I’ll make you stand out from the crowd. Chris Badgett: Tell us about prompts, like what are some good prompts or ways to think about prompts instead of Hey, I’m a course creator about, let’s say, Bitcoin investing, write me a sales page or create a course outline based on this topic, like these really simple prompts, but like you said, you’re going to end up in a sea of sameness. So how can we prompt better? You Nick Usborne: have to learn it. I’m, forever a student. I’m taking a course right now, which is making my brain hurt. And it’s about prompt engineering, but it’s beyond the front interface. It’s in the developer interface with, GPT 4 where prompting prompt, engineering is really a very structured process. But for, everyday use, if you’re working within a GPT 4. One of the remarkable things is you can do very well with a very simple conversation. It’s a chat. It’s chat. All right. It’s chat GPT. It is conversational. It is optimized for conversation back and forth. So that’s what I do is, I might say, okay, and you should start off like here’s a simple piece of of prompt engineering advice for you. Start off by saying. Asking the A. I. To take on a particular persona like act as the founder of a course creation company that serves this market so that the A. I. Knows what is it’s the background. Give it some context. So act as or write as if you were. Something like that. So give it, tell it who it is before you ask it to write something. Act as an expert in online copywriting with many years experience. And your audience is Tell ’em who your audience is, then you get in. So this, is like some of the structure of more formal prompt engineering. You say who you who, I want the AI to be, who the audience is gonna be. And now comes the prompt here’s, the goal I wanna achieve here’s the prompt I’m gonna put in there to get me part of the way. So, you can formalize it in that way. And just those two things of act as such and such, and here’s the context. Here’s the audience. So it’s almost like giving it a bit more of a briefing background, and then you ask the question. What I’ve done in the past is I’ve got the best results where I will do this by steps. It’s a bit of a prompt chain. So I will say you from XR, I have this separate chat on my left hand column, all to do with this course that I teach. GPT 4 is familiar with this thread of conversation. I’ll say, Hey, based on everything about my course write me an email. Promote promoting the course and let’s make it a three part email that we’re going to do it for five days, and it’ll write me the emails and I’ll look at it. And because of the background conversation above, it’s usually pretty good. And I’ll say, you know what, make that a little bit more. It sounds a little formal, make it a little bit more conversational. And it’ll rewrite it in a slightly changed tone. Sometimes it goes too far. So I have to pull it by saying not quite that conversation somewhere in between, and then it does it again. All right. So then I’ll say, okay, but it’s like you’re leading with some, it understands things like benefits, difference between features and benefits. So I’ll say, yeah, but you’re opening with a feature there. Let’s open with a benefit. Maybe we can weave a story, a bit of a story. Let’s put an example in their story. And so it’ll do that. And maybe I won’t love it. So I’ll tweak that prompt a bit. So what I’m doing is I very rarely just go in with one ask and then print out the outcome or copy and paste it. I’m usually Conversation, right? It’s a conversational experience. I’m usually going back to forwards until I hit something just right. Do I then cut and copy and paste that into my email delivery service? Usually not let’s say it comes in with a story like a little example of just to humanize this thing. I said, Hey, that’s cool. And I said, Hey, you know what? That reminds me of something that happened to me. So I’ll actually take the email that is written, but I’ll actually then take out their example story and I’ll put in a real one from me. Because somehow that changes stuff. All right. And like having done that, I think, yeah, but you know what, being me, I wouldn’t actually the first sentence with those five words, I’d probably say something. So what I’m doing is I’m getting AI to do a lot of the heavy lifting on my copywriting, and it’s also encouraging me to do much better because sometimes I’ll sit down, like I’ve, I did it this morning. I’ve had a busy day. I had to write out an email. I wrote it out. I’ve got it scheduled to go, but I’ll probably pull it back out. I want to tweak it a bit more because. It’s okay. If I’d done that with AI, I probably just have been more focused on those, steps, the process and AI very often will bring in a point of view or an idea or a thought that I hadn’t thought of, and I wouldn’t have thought of. So, it really can be a creative partner in this. So I go I start off with the A. I. And then, like I say, with the example of my own story rather than this made up example. Now what I’m doing is I’m weaving in the emotional intelligence. All right. And I’m doing that final edit. To make sure that this fear this is a kind of emotional proximity between me and the reader. But let’s say you can also get there if you do with this kind of prompt engineering thing is you start off with act as and then tell them a bit of background about the audience. If you just give them a little bit of extra background information, they can usually do a little better in the first and second draft. Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. You mentioned in your revision to the prompt of making it more conversational and you actually have another course called conversational copywriting. Can you give us a high level on what that is when we’re writing copy? What makes copy conversational? Nick Usborne: The conversational copyright, it was almost like in anticipation of this moment, because in fact, emotionally intelligent copy. is generally conversational copy. So in fact, I’ve got, where are we? A wonderful book here by Judith Glaser, Conversational Intelligence. So we’ve got cognitive intelligence, we’ve got emotional intelligence, we’ve got conversational intelligence. And that really was what my, that course was about. So again, if we go back into Relationships and conversations in companies. Sometimes a manager or a boss or a team leader is not as empathetic as they could be. They don’t have that. They’re not working with a high degree of emotional intelligence. Conversational intelligence is very, closely related. So if I’m one of those not very highly emotionally intelligent managers and I’m in conversation with the subordinate, I’m probably not managing that conversation terribly well. I’m probably lacking in empathy. I’m probably talking more than I’m listening when I should actually be listening more than I’m talking. So my course on conversational copywriting in a sense was anticipating the need to add emotional intel. I didn’t talk explicitly about emotional intelligence, but in a sense, that’s what it is about. It’s certainly about conversational intelligence, which is to have like she, Judith worked as a consultant to companies going in and retraining people, like from the boss down of how to have more intelligent conversations. And it really was about empathy. It was about listening. Yeah, I should do a double package of both the courses together, because in, in a sense, the conversational copywriting course is almost like how to write. In emotionally intelligent way. That’s awesome. Chris Badgett: And how is that similar to being in conversation with the AI? What, overlaps between writing conversational copy versus engaging in this conversational interface? Like, you mentioned, you wrote the email series, but that probably included like 10 back and forth before you had something to edit off the AI. Yeah. How do we. Become more emotionally and conversationally intelligent when, working with the AI specifically in the prompts, Nick Usborne: you can, you, you can ask it, you can say, Hey, we’re writing to, let’s say some kind of medical thing. And you, can say to GPT 4, Hey we’re writing to people who generally have a family member who is, unwell. So let’s be empathetic. Let’s be sensitive in how we write. And this is say, one of the things that completely blows my mind is, that chat GPT will get it. Now. It doesn’t get it in terms of consciousness Oh, my goodness, I feel for you, but it understands what I’m saying. And as a result, when he writes the copy, it will be more empathetic. It will not. And it may be. This is the kind of thing it’s the I can’t do emotion. It simply reads about human experience of emotion, which means it’s sometimes quite clumsy. In how it handles it. So if I say I’m writing in some medical device or medical thing, and it’s for people who are very unwell. So let’s be sensitive about that. It may overdo it when it comes back. All right, so I might find myself editing it back a bit so that it’s not too over the top in terms of Oh, poor you. So it’s you can go to a certain degree. Like I say, sentiment analysis. It does really well. I did that. I did a survey A couple of weeks ago, and there were the responses, 120 people. answered an open ended question at the end. So I had this like thousands of words and again, impossible. So again, I just downloaded it, threw it into duty for us and hey, give me a sentiment analysis on this, which it did. It does, it comprehends what sentiment means, what emotion means. But when it tries to write emotionally, you just always, you have to edit because sometimes it’ll, it doesn’t quite get it because it hasn’t been there. It hasn’t felt anything itself. Chris Badgett: Tell us about your course future proof copywriting. Like how did you structure it? What’s inside the program? Nick Usborne: It’s basically in, in, three sections. The first section is on how to lean into artificial intelligence, how to maximize your use of AI as a content writer, copywriter, social media writer, SEO writer. So don’t be shy. You’ve got to, if you want to come out of this ahead, step one is to lean into the technology and keep up with it. Hey, you and me both. I think today or the last few days have been playing around with Delhi three within GPT four. So now, in a very simple conversational way, I can generate high quality images within GPT four, which a week ago, we couldn’t really do unless we were on a kind of super duper list. But so, leading up to technology like Keep, in touch with it, watch it, because this is moving so quickly. It’s, like insane, which makes it very exciting, but it does mean that you’ve got to actually make a bit of an effort to stay ahead, not be ahead as a kind of, but Hey I, do. I listened to a podcast on AI probably most days, just in an attempt to see where everything is going. So step one, so the court, the first third of the course is teaching you. to become a more productive writer through application of AI. Step two of the course is the same for EI, for emotional intelligence. So it’s, deep dive learning into what does it mean to be emotionally intelligent? What does it mean to be emotionally intelligent writer? How do we apply emotionally the domains of emotional intelligence, there’s four domains. How do we apply that to writing social media or writing content or writing a sales page or an email or a newsletter? And how do you know? What is the I then stage three in the final stage before the kind of concluding lessons is how to combine the two? How do we combine a I and E I together? Eso step this first section a I second section E I in the third section is how we put those together. How we get the most of a I But also blend in EI so that the copywriting is better. And also said that we can separate ourselves from the crowd, whether we are a, whether we’re building a course, whether we are, and I’ve helped, I’ve got a, I’ve got some more courses up my sleeve and two of them have been very much co creations with chat with GPT for I’ve come up with the kernel of an idea for a course and I’ll say, what do you think, how would you structure this? And I chat about it and they come back and I say, yeah, but section four, that’s, you’re not getting it. I want to do something more so I’ve spent like, when it comes to brainstorming, whether it’s the structure of a sales page or the structure of the course itself, like the structure of a course itself, I’ve spent hours over the course of days, sometimes weeks of going back and forth. using it as a, Hey, it’s a brainstorming buddy. It’s the smartest, it’s the most knowledgeable buddy you will ever, have. It knows everything about everything. It’s insane. And it’s super smart. So yeah, I use it across the board. I’m probably rambling now and went past the point of your question. Chris Badgett: No, that’s it. That’s it. Go check out the course, future proof copywriting. That’s it. Nick us born. com Lifter 15 will save you 15%, but we’re not done. I have some more questions for you, Nick. Some of the people out there watching are WordPress professionals or they have an agency, they work with clients, particularly in the LMS niche. So they have course creators and coaches and clients. How might a. If you’re an agency versus a course creator leveraged, what are some ways that agency could leverage this? One thing that jumps out at me is instead of giving somebody a website with a bunch of Latin text on there to actually use the AI to help you write starter content for a client. But what else? Nick Usborne: That’s happening already. And it’s I’ve used it. Aside the tool called Canva for a long time just, simple templates for Facebook posts and Twitter and tweets or X’s or whatever they’re called, but some of the stuff they’re doing with AI in terms of manipulation of those images it used to be stuff you had to be on the beta list of Photoshop to get that kind of functionality. Now you can get it within, Canva. It’s, nuts, but also when you start typing in Canva, you have an option, you just click a button. And Canva will write a first draft for you. I’m, sure this is happening in, Oh, so some of the email provide the, I’m trying to think which one I think it was in get response. I was working in it the other day and it said, Oh, Hey, would you like us to write a first draft? And I was like, no, but interesting. So, tools that are integrated other services, all other services, we’ve seen like search engines that are integrating it. Everyone has to integrate it now. Canva and within WordPress. And I know other platforms what was I working in again? Shopify, offered to write me a product description with its AI. So if, I’m an agency. It’s a challenging time because the number crunch will say, awesome. We can fire, half of our illustrators and our media people and our copywriters, and we can get AI to do all the heavy lifting. And, I get that. Maybe if you have two or three extra copywriters or extra designers, I can see the argument for that. I think there is a danger. I’ve read, I’ve, on discussion lists, I’ve heard back from the inside of agencies. Actually, I know an agency owner in the city where I live, and we talked about it, and he said that is a knee jerk. They stopped hiring certain types of people and just used AI. But what he’s finding is that it’s, really easy to use AI superficially. It’s really hard to use it well. And you actually need to hire some of those people back to help you use it. There was a story I heard, which is in a sense, heartbreaking the other day, there’s this illustrator. He’s been illustrating for big magazine covers for decades. Super, well respected. And he’s seeing his work just dry up, dry out, dry up. He got a call the other day from one of his former clients, like a big, national magazine said, okay, can you do a cover for us? And he said, Oh, wow, cool. Excellent. Of course. I thought I’d never hear from you guys again. What makes you tend to me today? And the answer from that company, this is the heartbreaking bit was that, oh, our AI engineer is overwhelmed right now. In other words, the robots are busy. The robots are busy. We’re going to have to go second best and go to a human illustrator who served us well for decades, which is it’s really sad in one sense. But, part of this is that. I think step one that a lot of companies did is they, used AI probably more than they should have done. And I think the step, a lot of agencies and groups have yet to take is to understand that you’ve really got to train people to use AI. Like I said I’m, doing this deep dive into a very kind of high level training myself because I want to stay ahead of the pack. It’s my nature. I like new stuff. But I’m hearing from like firsthand and secondhand within agencies where that they’ve. They’re trying to automate too much. It’s like such an exciting prospect of, Oh my goodness. We can hire 20 percent of us, fire 20 percent of the staff and do this automatically. And you can, but it won’t happen very well. You’ve got to hold on to some of those people and retrain those people. So you can be much more productive, but it’s not, however good these tools are, there, there is a one button press version. But that’s not the best version. The best version is where you have a human being who is really highly trained in this, and then they can really make this stuff dance. Chris Badgett: One more thing I wanted to get into with you, with emotional intelligence, and you actually just did it very naturally right there, where it was, is I want to talk about story and how to use it, and you just did it in your answer right there, you’re like, that reminds me of a story of a graphic artist, how can we better use story on our sales pages and our lesson videos? How do we think about that? Nick Usborne: It’s weird because I have, as I have another course on Lyfter called selling with stories. So it’s like everything I’ve been doing for years has been in anticipation of this moment. So stories are uniquely human. All right. GPT 4 doesn’t have a first hand memory of their their first kiss or their first beer or the first time they lied to their parents and went to a party when they said they were somewhere else. Like they don’t have these memories. So we have these stories and a lot of our culture, a lot of our shared beliefs tie up in the stories that we share. And a lot of stories will cross It doesn’t matter whether you’re from India or whether you’re from Alaska, there are some stories like being a teenager, falling in love, first kiss, the broken heart that, that are common. So, stories that are an incredibly powerful way to connect with people emotionally stories, almost always emotional for good or bad, you sit down at Thanksgiving with your family and maybe your family isn’t always the best. Maybe, you’re not the best. Maybe it’s not the most. Emotionally intelligence group or a mostly emotionally intelligent group around the table. But boy, do you have some stories that you can share and you do share stories. So, it goes right to the heart of what it means to be human and what community feels like, what family feels like is the shared stories that we have. So that’s why the example I gave a little while ago where, chat GPT gave me a GPT for gave me a generic story. example. And I took that out and I replaced it with a real story because it just there’s something about that just rings true. And people again, if people have been reading me for a while, it’s that sounds like Nick. I can see Nick in that situation. That’s that feels real. So yes, stories. And also within stories, make it experiential, make it sensory. It’s like walking on the beach and hearing the cry of the gulls above your head. AI doesn’t know that we know that it’s, part of it’s, part of a story we, we, can share. And it also helps us to avoid that sameness trap because if we’re all using the same tool and we’re all doing the top 20, if we’ve looked up the top 50 prompts on Google, all right, we’re using all using the same top 50 prompts. We’re all using GPT 4 and then we get this sameness trap. Everything starts sounding the same. And that’s not gonna have a good outcome for anyone not, for the writers, not for the companies, not for the course creators or whatever. So use the tool, then weave in emotional intelligence. And yes, stories is part of that, conversational writing is, and conversational is, writing, copywriting is, going back to your question there. It’s just everyday writing. It’s as if you’re talking to someone across the kitchen table. You can be enthusiastic, but you don’t have to be a salesperson. Just, conversational everyday language and writing. If Chris Badgett: artificial intelligence can speed us up, accelerate our writing contribute new ideas, particularly at the brainstorming phase, do we end up as digital writers spending about the same amount of time? Are we actually more productive? We spending the same amount of time, but it’s higher quality output? Are we actually more productive? With our time Nick Usborne: I think we can be a lot more productive. So, I have I have a few kind of passion hobby websites. I’m a bit of a coffee geek. I’m a mushroom geek. And so last night, actually, I was just brainstorming with GPT 4 and I said, Hey, give me some, actually, I fed in some survey results into GPT 4. I said, based on this survey results, what are people most interested in hearing about? And it spat me out 10 topics. And I wrote back and said, you know what? I’ve covered all of those. I’ve already covered those in the website. Give me some non obvious in between topics, which it did. When I said non obvious, it understood it perfectly. And it came back with some non obvious. And, one of them was about bioluminescent mushrooms. I said, cool. I said, write me a 600 word blog post on, on bioluminescent mushrooms, which it did. And I went in and I tweaked it and I changed it. And I changed it. I just I did a, probably a 15 minute. editing time on it. And then I got an image for it and I’ll put it out. So I can probably produce five or 10 pieces of content now in the time that used to take me one. And that’s by, and also a better topic. I wouldn’t, I hadn’t thought of bioluminescence and this is always happening. I’ll use it for, it could be a professional side. It could be a client side. It could be coffee or mushrooms, whatever, in whatever’s interesting me that day. And I’ll often ask, give me the non obvious. Give get, taken a symmetrical approach to that. Tell me something that I wouldn’t think of. And it does. And that’s the gold for me. So it makes me more productive. It actually makes me better as well. But I would say probably in terms of productivity as a writer, I’ve got to be somewhere between five times and 10 times more productive than I was. And that’s even putting in the extra work. Chris Badgett: So go check out future proof, copywriting at Nick Osborne. com. Use a coupon code Lifter 15. And Nick, I want to thank you for coming back on the show. Thank you for sharing your wisdom with us. That was a, bunch of tactical gold in there too, about how to better work with AI, any final words for the people before we sign off today, Nick Usborne: just lean into it. Don’t be like, so I was, I did a survey on this and I was discouraged because there was like 35 percent of writers, copywriters that I surveyed said, Oh, it’s nothing to worry about. It’s just a hype. It’ll just disappear. And I thought that’s a very high percentage. Don’t be this is like the, candle makers looking at Edison and saying there’s light bulbs that’ll come to nothing. This, is a huge transformative disruptive change here. So my one piece of advice is lean into it just as far and fast as you can. Chris Badgett: Thanks for coming on the show, Nick. We really appreciate Nick Usborne: it. Thanks for inviting me. Thanks for inviting me. 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 at LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Go to LifterLMS. com forward slash 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 Sell More Courses Using Copywriting with AI and Emotional Intelligence with Nick Usborne appeared first on LMScast.

Andy Whitaker from Rustici Software discusses eLearning standards like SCORM, AICC, and XAPI for WordPress LMS. He highlights the importance of SCORM in the e-learning environment and urges WordPress to consider future-oriented standards like XAPI and CMI 5. The episode covers the history of Rustaci Software, challenges of using WordPress as an LMS, and the potential of adopting standards in the WordPress ecosystem.

In this LMScast episode, Roger Rosweide discuss about Wildcloud platform, which lets users utilize WordPress to create websites that resemble Shopify or Wix. He also discuss about recurring revenue Online Education WaaS. Roger Rosweide, a co-founder of Wildcloud, is also an expert content writer. Wildcloud, an agency turned platform, has integrated contemporary DevOps techniques to expedite website development. In response to user demand for Learning management platform creation, LifterLMS and Wildcloud have partnered to present the LifterLMS Blueprint on Wildcloud. The goal of this collaboration is to make learning management platform development more accessible and user-friendly. Through a streamlined and customizable procedure, the collaboration looks to be focused on enabling users to create and sell online courses with ease. 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 Badgett. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, 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. His name is Roger Rosweide. He’s from wildcloud. com. Welcome to the show. Roger Rosweide: Thanks a lot. Thanks for having me and not a bad job on the pronunciation of my last name. Chris Badgett: It’s not bad for my first try. Roger, tell us about wildcloud. What is it? Roger Rosweide: Yeah, of course. Wildcloud is essentially a platform where you can build your own Shopify or Wix or Webflow using nothing but WordPress. So we used to be an agency and we felt, that we were reinventing the wheel with every project and we had to start from scratch. We wanted to productize. And so the way we did that is by building our own. What is essentially a hosting platform, but has all the bells and whistles of like modern DevOps SaaS like development. And that’s what we built for ourselves in the first place. We were able to automatically sell sites via our own webshop, manage all the sites as if it’s only one and take care of hosting. And then we had a lot of questions from people that were saying like, how the hell did you guys did this? And so we turned it into a platform, made it a lot simpler to use. So you’ve got all the benefits of modern DevOps standards and best practices, but in a very simple way. And so our, customers, they position themselves as competitors to Wix and Shopify, often very specific to a certain use case. So they either build websites for golf courses, or they build websites for, I don’t even know why this pops into my head. We have one customer who’s building sites for OnlyFans creators. So you have your own OnlyFans platform and you’re not, you don’t have to pay. We have for some reason, many customers that do websites for print shops, which I didn’t know was a thing still but yeah they sell them automatically manage and improve on those sites as one rollout features to all your customers at the same time, do it very safely. And then have a serverless platform so that you don’t have to worry about scaling. Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And I’m super excited to announce on the show that we’ve got a LifterLMS blueprint cloud option coming with wildcloud. Tell us about that. So you mentioned like you could build a shop like Shopify, but you could also build a site like Teachable or Kajabi or. Thinkific and WordPress helps democratize things. And now here you are democratizing SaaS or software as a service so that others can do it more easily. I’m super excited about it. Tell us about how Lifter Cloud on Wildcloud works and how people can think about it. Roger Rosweide: First of all, thanks for saying it this way. Because if I said it myself as a founder, it may sound fake. If you’re if, I say we want to democratize the way people build SaaS, but it is actually our mission statement. I don’t know if you’ve read that somewhere. I don’t think we have it published, but yeah, no that’s, the whole thing. And so the, LifterCloud blueprint. Came to be simply from popular by popular request, honestly. So one of the, one of the main use cases that we see on the platform is that people want to build a community and they want to teach that community, whatever wisdom they have. And I think this is something that just came into popularity as the pandemic started happening. Everybody’s now suddenly was a coach. And I don’t mean to say that now. Everybody should start being a coach, but it is some, anybody with a latent desire to preserve the knowledge, spread their knowledge and teach other people is is welcome to use the blueprint for LifterLMS and build their own learning management platform, just like a Javi. But using the LifterLMS plugin suite. And the reason why I’m so excited about this whole Lifter thing is because it almost feels as if you’ve guys have built your whole suite. Knowing that we would show up one day because it works so well. And I’ll tell you why. So if you have for example, just one plugin, it becomes much harder for us to strip out the individual services and features that make up all the benefits that you guys have to offer. But fortunately you haven’t, and you have all these different plugins. Some of them are free. Some of them are premium. And what we’ve done is we’ve taken your demo website, which has everything in it. And we’ve put that on the platform. That is the, product that people can sell. All our customers have to do is customize it to their specific niche. Really, they can get going. But then the beauty is really in the storefront that we give you for free as well. So you have a storefront where you sell your products. And then we have your application where you manage your customers. And the storefront has all these different add ons. So it basically turns into a marketplace where you built, where you sell your basic product, your standard product, so to say, which is made up of the free LifterLMS plugins. And then if you want to upsell your customers features that they need. You could do that by using the premium plugins. So you have this super accessible way of giving your value to your customer base and then create more value while stacking your bank account at the same time. And it just happens to be in the perfect way because this is how you’ve built your. And it just works out of the box on our platform. I couldn’t be more excited. Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. I appreciate you saying that. It’s I’ve always seen LifterLMS as a platform, like it’s a complete solution. So we have all the, you want the coaching, we have the coaching module. You want the community, we have the community module, various advanced features and things. But you could still custom, they could still customize the blueprint and add more to it. Two, right? Yeah. Roger Rosweide: So the I think the reason why we compliment each other so well is because anybody who buys your plugins from the website and uses it on a, on what we now call a single tenant website because we have a multi tenant platform and a single tenant website is just one single individual website that isn’t connected to any other websites. You have obviously the full range of whatever you want to build. And when you build that site and you give it to someone else, that someone else can also control and build and improve on that site, however they want to. And they can pick and choose whatever they want from your plugin suite as well. The difference on our platform is that typically an agency or a freelancer builds a product on our platform. In this case, they use your plugins to, to build that entire product. Let’s say you’re, building Kajabi, so to speak. Then the end customer, so the customer of our customer, they get a site where they get a total solution, but they can’t delete or install new plugins. So it is a solution that is managed by the vendor, which is the agency. And one of the features that our platform has is that you can manage all of those sites as one. But it also does impose certain restrictions on the end user because they can’t install or delete new plugins. It is very safe for them. They can’t really mess anything up. They can’t really destroy the site and it gives. The management over to the vendor, but at the end of the day, it is possible that at some point, the end customer needs something more customized. They’ve become so popular, they want to dedicate a full team to this site only. In that case, it breaks the uniformity that our platform imposes on those sites. And then you just take it out and it’s just a normal WordPress installation. And I think that’s one thing that demonstrates the mission that we have of democratizing SaaS. Which is if you have an account on Kajabi or Shopify or Wix, there’s this vendor lock in, you can’t go anywhere else. If you need to have more performance or you need more features, you’re completely subject to whatever Kajabi is willing to do for you. And in our case, you can actually build a Lifter cloud solution. You can sell it to people who need something accessible straight away, something that is managed. And then at some point when they do become very popular with whatever they’ve bought from you, you could just move it somewhere else, dedicate a team to it, and it still works in exactly the same way. Chris Badgett: That’s the best of both worlds, right? Yeah. Let’s talk about the opportunity a little bit, like the, niches, like your customer, the vendors or the agencies or the, coaches. I could see like somebody who let’s say helps life coaches in particular, like start and grow their businesses. Oh, and by the way, we now have this coaching course software in a box that you can just sign in, sign up for. And now you have a fully functional website and LMS. I think about fitness coaches I think one of the cool things here is Kajabi, Teachable, Thinkific, Podia, platforms like that they, just focus on the whole market, like all course creators, but there’s this huge opportunity in all these niches. For people that are already helping whoever their niche is to start teaching online as part of their value stack. What, kind of niches or types of people could you see vendor to become vendors of this that could really benefit? Yeah, thanks. Roger Rosweide: Maybe to, start at something that you said in the beginning and then work my way towards your question. This is exactly how we always explain it to our customers or anybody that we talk to. So if you look at the popularity of the big social media platforms, obviously there’s where you go to broadcast yourself to the entire world. And you would say, following that logic that then small membership communities would just die out. But they’re not I’m on post that is the community of WordPress. Why wouldn’t I, why wouldn’t we do that on, on, on Facebook instead? And I think it’s because people still cling to this sense of specialism. Like we want to be in a small group of like minded people that share the same expertise and interests. And that I think is something that we have to translate more generally to the SaaS ecosystem. WordPress for the longest time has been the biggest CMS platform in the world for building websites. And now we can actually. And so what we always tell people is if you want to build a successful SaaS in this day and age, niche down as much as you can. Just niche down as much as you possibly can to get the first few customers for you to break even, and then expand from there. So we actually have an example of a exactly the, journey that you just mentioned, but then in a single customer. So you have a company that focuses, that used to focus only on delivering sites to coaches. Then they expanded to coaches and, or rather it was physical therapists. That became physical therapists and coaches and that became physical therapists, coaches, and personal trainers. And then they adopted the, course building a product as well, and and they were able to deliver that entire product to all the three different dishes because they’ve already conquered that. So obviously it makes sense. Anybody who is in the business of teaching people on a daily basis, whether that’s again, a coach. But it could also just be a lawyer, right? It could be anybody who’s in the business of providing services that have a bit of an onboarding ramp. So it could be mediators, it could be psychologists, it could be. Doctors in general. Yeah. Real estate agents, obviously, of course. That’s something that I hardly know anything about and I’m always hesitant to to trust a real estate agent on his word, because it feels like all you do is sell all day, but obviously there’s more to it. I have real estate agent friends. And there’s a lot of value to be shared. So I think in that sense, it’s not so much the niche you want to dive into. It’s the type of product that you want to offer. If you want to offer an accessible product, if you want to offer something that is. A full solution that people can onboard themselves on, often at a more affordable price point. So our customers typically sell those prebuilt managed solutions between 80 to 250. And on average, they have about 14 websites. That they launched in the first two months. So that’s with all the new people coming in and all the people that graduate, that’s about the efforts that we have on the platform, but obviously we have outliers that exceed that 10 times or a hundred times even but at the end of the day, you’re offering something to people that they can just start building right away. Usually all they have to do is upload their own courses and it really does become a SaaS instead of. A WordPress website that you then still need to learn how to use. Chris Badgett: For someone who’s not as far along on the journey, if they’re running an agency in some niche, can you unpack like the fundamentals of a WASP or website as a service, like what? Yes. Yeah. Roger Rosweide: I seem to do nothing else, but it’s, it is a fairly new concept. I don’t think it’s a fairly new concept. It’s a, it’s a. It’s a concept that’s gaining notoriety because now the infrastructure is finally there to successfully implement it where it wasn’t before. So a WAAS or website as a service is basically a site that is prebuilt and managed for you that you pay for often on a subscription basis. So instead of paying a couple thousand dollars or sometimes even a hundred thousand dollars for a site up front. And then often also after it’s been delivered in the form of maintenance, you get it. It is completely built already. Often the builder puts his experience into the product. Therefore it’s often specialized to a certain niche. Or functionality. So we have our biggest use case on the platform is e commerce shops. Anybody wants to sell something, you don’t have to get a whole project up and running. You can just buy the full solution and just change the copy, change a few pages, upload some media, upload your products, and you’re good to go. And in that sense, you’re basically using web development in a SaaS and then if you want to truly build like a SAS, or rather, if you want to sell like a SAS, you have to build like a SAS. So what are the three features of any SAS really? The first thing that people often overlook is that it’s hosted, right? If you like any SAS, like literally name one. Is hosted somewhere. You didn’t have to buy hosting for it. So that’s the fundamental. That’s the basic thing. And then another thing is that you sell it automatically. If you go to a SAS, if you want to get notion, for example, you can buy notion. You don’t have to call someone. And then that guy will explain what notion is like, and then go come over to your house and install it on your computer. So you sell, it via shop and then the people over at Notion don’t want to manage and maintain and improve the individual Notion users individually. You want to have a way to centralize that. And there’s this cloud technology that wasn’t available up until recently. It’s called multi tenancy. And so basically what multi tenancy means is that all the functionality of all those customers is shared. So again, if you look at the example of Notion, I use Notion every day. I use it for my notes. We use it for our entire company to schedule and plan our projects and features and roadmaps, whatnot. All that stuff that we’ve stored, that we’ve created ourselves, that is ours. That’s individual that’s on our environment, but all the features, all the databases all the folders that we create, those are features that are shared between all the users. And that’s something that has never been possible for WordPress, other than on a multi site, which has numerous different downsides to doing in that way, but the multi tenant architecture makes that possible for WordPress. So again if you boil it down to its essentials, it is one master environment that you as a team can use to build out your product. Then when you’re ready, you ship out the features to your customers, just like any other SaaS. And that’s truly unique. And that’s what enables the website as a service business model. Chris Badgett: I know you’ve said that you’ve done that presentation a lot, but that is the best definition I’ve ever heard of a WAF, which is the backbone of what you do, but nice job. That was really good. I wish I, I wish that wild cloud existed when I got started in WordPress. Cause I could see so much opportunity when I was just freelancing, taking any client I could. So for example, one of my early clients was an auto body repair shop and I built him a great solution with WordPress. So I could take today, I could take what I learned in, in, in serving this niche and I could build. My autobody website, SAS and, then just target that market and sell to them through ads or content or whatever. And do it in for real, I did some stuff with real estate. I did some stuff with restaurants, I think restaurants, but particularly certain types of restaurants like, Oh, this is a restaurant website platform for. Korean barbecue or whatever the niche is. There’s just so much, I can see so much opportunity for freelancers and agencies to provide the website as a solution. Yeah. Thanks. Roger Rosweide: It I’m glad you didn’t because we wouldn’t have this awesome kick ass but now and, but yeah if you did, you could have a Podcast right now about odd auto body shops instead of doing the Lyft cast. But anyways the funny thing is, and this is something that I’m truly passionate about because I wasn’t, we weren’t really aware that we were a WordPress company when we started this, we were an agency and we were using WordPress to build sites and we were definitely dedicated to building sites with WordPress. We did buy into the whole philosophy of of, open source. But we didn’t feel like a WordPress company and we just build a tool to manage our own sites. And unfortunately, because we had a certain focus, we actually focused on restaurants and gyms. Okay. So we had this stack that we had developed at some point, but we were super annoyed that when we had this latest state of our preferred stack, we wouldn’t, we weren’t able to roll that out to our previous customers. And so we had to continuously upsell the maintenance because it would essentially break down, but they weren’t getting all the improvements of the features because that’s not, that was not what they were paying for. We actually wanted to give that as part of our ongoing services to increase retention. So that’s how we got into the mindset of actually building this. But fortunately, and this is where I’m so proud to say that we can actually make a contribution to the WordPress ecosystem. Instead of one company. Basically taking over and, I’m not vilifying like a Kajabi. They’re doing a great service. I’m only saying if you don’t want to build everything from scratch and you want to own what you build. And you buy into the open source philosophy, then creating a product on wild cloud, using the plugin suite from Lifter, using some SEO plugins, using some caching plugins, and you could just curate it essentially, and then make it your own. Create some extra custom CMS, CSS, or do something with a special theme, create a custom plugin, and then just give it to people or sell it, of course, but you you, sell them something that they own. And that’s something that I’m personally very proud of. Chris Badgett: That is an amazing accomplishment to blend both of those worlds. Let’s talk about pricing a little bit in terms of pricing a website as a service. Cause I think a lot of agencies and freelancers, they’re just in a different model, it’s like a 200, website, but if you’re actually, if you have a blueprint set up in wild cloud and. Your, niche can buy individual websites from you, the agency directly, like how much did they charge for it? What are you seeing on your platform? Let’s use like a, learning example. Let’s say I, I help yoga instructors also teach online and give them business consulting and things like that. So if I had a, yoga LMS website in a box. How much should the end customer pay per month for that? Roger Rosweide: So first off the mistake that I personally made in the beginning, say two and a half years ago was not only trying to change our entire business model and become solely product based, so no longer doing any services and then trying to convince our early customers to do the same. I think it’s more of a, I think it’s more complimentary to the service model you have currently. And it’s, and it serves as a great lead magnet where your customers pay you instead of you paying for them to get the leads. And so what I mean by that is when we started adopting that model and, advising that to our customers, they actually blew up tremendously. So what usually happens is if you build an LMS and it has What you described now is pretty basic features, right? You’re, dropping your courses, you’re enrolling people in your courses. You could game, gamify it a little bit but it’s fairly straightforward, right? It’s, you consume media and you don’t have to do quizzes, for example. It’s, yoga after all. In that case it, is something that you, that a yoga teacher. If we if we keep it fairly straightforward and exclude any form of community for now, so it’s, truly, you’re selling a course and you don’t update that course on the regular, then it wouldn’t really make sense to charge too much for it for for the yoga teacher and customer. So anywhere between a hundred dollars to 200, I think is a very fair price. In terms of receiving a community website where you can drop your courses, it’s managed, it’s update, it’s updated, and it’s hosted. But on top of that, this site still needs to be found. So you can upsell SEO. The agency often has a content arm, so you can either do social media content creation and or management. You may want to help people with website assembly. So an example that I can actually come up with right now is one of our customers is is an agency in Houston, Texas. And I’m not sure if they do a platform for yoga teachers, but they do a similar thing. And I know that they sell the sites for 80 per month. Then they have a service that they’ll assemble the site for 600. They sell social media management for an ongoing 500 fee and SEO for 500. So an 80 site that people can just buy and get on right away and possibly finish and customize themselves pretty quickly turns into one or 2, 000 per month in ongoing services. That you sell from building the reputation and building the trust of selling this final product in the first place. And like I said it’s, almost a lead magnet where you just collect dozens of customers and get onto, and then you just keep an eye on them and they’ll, turn to you when they need additional services. So it really scalable way to scale your agency, but it doesn’t mean that you have to forget and forgo any other, any of the services that. I’ve made you successful right now. I love that idea. Chris Badgett: I think about that. That was spent our core philosophy from LFTR LMS since the beginning is that we put our customer at the center of the business, not the PR, not our product. So it’s one of the reasons we do this podcast yeah, they need a LMS software, but they also need education on how to do other things like marketing, instructional design, work with technology. So we’ve just continued to add value around the customer. And so a WAAS business, a website is often just a piece of a bigger puzzle. So if I could give people a word of advice from my agency days, where I did the real estate sites, the yoga sites, the restaurant sites, because I didn’t focus on a customer, I was just going wherever I could get paid. But once I started really focusing on the online educator, Then that’s when everything changed and I found my niche and that’s, you can do the same thing in any agency. Roger Rosweide: You’re, getting me very enthusiastic right now. It’s one of my passion subjects you could say. So it’s basically the difference between selling a solution and building a solution, right? So if you’re selling a solution you’re, selling not just the product, but also your principles. You’re selling your philosophy and you’re selling your perspective on how a problem should be solved. And you can actually scale that idea by creating content where you continuously implement the philosophy and the principles that you are using to approach the problem. And it doesn’t only have to pertain to your products and only has, doesn’t only have to pertain to your business model, but it’s something that is, that you carry out into all the aspects of your business in your life. But if you’re building a solution, it’s just like you say, you’re basically going where the money is. And so you have to have to pick and choose your principles for that particular product project. People barely get to know who you are and what you stand for as an entrepreneur, as a specialist, as an expert on a specific subject. It often takes years to establish that. And at the end of the day, also a few very difficult decisions on where you’re going to focus your energy. But if you do that by, by scaling the principles that you put into a product. It becomes much easier to focus on something. And again, it still doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t sell additional services. It just means that any of the services, that you end up selling are going to be an extension of the product that you’re offering. So it’s again, something that is highly focused, highly efficient. And scalable at the same time. And it’s something that we try to implement in every facet of our own business. So we do have a white glove onboarding service where we get people up and running. We’re going to launch our own marketing. Onboarding in a few weeks where we help people get to the first 10 to 20 customers. But again, that is always going to be focused upon getting you successful on our platform. And so it’s always in service of the website as a service model. So I completely agree with your statement there. I think that’s I think that’s why you’re successful and why we’re having this podcast. Chris Badgett: Awesome. One, one way I heard this described is you may have a solution looking for a customer. But that’s just the wrong way to go about it. It’s start with the customer and then surround them with the solutions. Exactly. I know, because we get this question about people from people interested in building website as a service and adding it into their stack of what they offer. We talked a little bit about pricing, but another nuance question is what’s a healthy profit margin? So for. If we’re just for the website piece how much should we mark up our our, what our WASPs are, the website per month. And I know that’s a, it depends question, but what, do you think is like a good starting point for people? Should it be like a hundred percent markup, 50 percent markup, like 20%? Roger Rosweide: I think it’s very, yeah. Yeah. I think it’s fairly reasonable. to say that including all the plugins that you pay for and all the additional services that makes it a little bit of a harder estimate, but in terms of the relation between the price that we ask for a single website hosted on our platform in comparison to the retail price, because that’s something that we can easily measure and that we’re also very aware of. We don’t, we have data on all the plugins that are installed, but we don’t know exactly which one are on the premium plan for every single plugin. I hope to get there one day. Anyways at 10 X multiplier from the cost that we charge to the retail price is, actually, I would say average, if not the minimum. So for example, our our lowest price is 4 37 per month for one website. And if you’re not selling that site for at least 40 per month, then I would say you’re insanely underpriced because at the end of the day, you’re selling someone that is a solution that is prebuilt, that is managed and is going to be maintained if not improved over time. So 40, I would say is the bare minimum of what you’re able to ask. There’s no upfront costs for people other than then the 40, 40 they own what they get and they can also just stop anytime they want. So from 4 to 40, I would say is a pretty interesting markup. Chris Badgett: That’s great. Yeah. 10 X that’s, yeah, that’s, Roger Rosweide: that’s, yeah. And and it goes for so for example, if you’re on our most expensive blend, then you actually pay 21 for a site. You can make it much more expensive, but that’s where our like predictable tiers ends. And then you can get more custom. We are after all very scalable platform, but then that is so heavy that we actually call the container that the site is in a heavy duty container. So like charging 200 for such a site that is so scalable and that is also undoubtedly going to get so much traffic. Is is, worth 200. Of course, 200 for a site per month. That is very popular. Why not? So yeah, 10, 10, 10 X multipliers. Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And I also think it’s important to realize if you’re in online business in any way, you probably pay a lot of money per month for some other SAS tool. Like I know I pay a lot of money to active campaign every month for my CRM and it’s worth it because that’s my email list. That’s my marketing automation. It’s, worth it. Tell us some more, or let’s brainstorm some ideas around an LMS WASP that people could do. You’ve mentioned like university, like what are, besides like coaches and consultants, like what are some other ways to think about where you could use one of these blueprints? Roger Rosweide: So something that I’m personally very passionate about and it’s maybe because my mother in law is a teacher at a Dutch. High school which is funny because she’s from Suriname, which is a very small country and in South America, but she teaches Dutch at a Dutch high school is giving giving, teachers an LMS or a lifter cloud. Yeah. It’s something that I want needs there to be because I feel that at least in my experience, teachers are sometimes demotivated by the system that they’re teaching in, but they’re very passionate about their subject. It’s what drove them to become teachers in the first place. So the school system can sometimes be a bit constraining. I know it’s a very hard job. They make very long hours. They have to grade all these papers. Kids aren’t easy. And I spend a fair amount of time on Instagram during my day to day, but I’m in the office, nobody’s going to reprimand me, but if you show weakness to high school, two teenagers for just a second, then you’re going to be demolished. So, that being said, I would love it. If teachers started. If a history teacher started his own Lifter cloud teaching platform and started teaching about ancient. Egyptian architecture. And and this is why I think the beauty of, having a, specialized WAS comes from, if you want to do something on Kajabi and it’s very straightforward, then you’re competing with Kajabi. So for example, yoga teachers in Kajabi, I think it can really work. If you choose Lifter instead, because there’s these other benefits that don’t really pertain to the actual features, but to the ownership, for example, and the philosophy that you buy into, but if you want to do something that’s very specialized, render 3d models of pyramids on your own was very hard to get from Kajabi, they don’t have that feature. But it’s more than feasible on a WordPress site because that is essentially what it is. So I’d love it if, teachers got their own learning platform where they could not only make a few extra dollars and have a side hustle, but also motivate and inspire people in a way that is more free than the current school system is where they don’t, where they aren’t constrained by. Exams and the way that should be done. Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Yeah. That’s a great use case. It’s funny. I was smiling when you said Egyptian, all the niches I see in, LFTR LMS. I remember this one person who specializes in this ancient Egyptian like hieroglyphic script style. And there’s people that are like keeping different languages alive and all these like niches. There’s just so many teachers out there and very few of them are. necessarily the perfect fit for just a raw WordPress site and trying to figure all that tech out, but there’s so much pent up demand and energy for wanting to teach, wanting to build that digital asset. And maybe they feel they’re just not in that like creator economy course coach market, the Kajabi and teachable and everybody’s marketing too, but they care just as much. And if somebody takes a stand and helps that particular sector of education, I think there is a huge opportunity there. Roger Rosweide: You wouldn’t believe how many. I want to say amateur teachers there are that’s the one challenge that I want to tackle in the, in 2024 is connect the WordPress builders with these teachers. I don’t have a, an actual word for it for them yet, I don’t mean to say that these are teachers that teach at schools. They are like intrinsic teachers. They are just born teachers and they might have a job as a plumber and they want to teach other people how to become a plumber, or they have a job selling cars and they are very good at it and they, just have this. This intense desire to teach what they know to other people. It’s just what they love. And I can completely relate with that. I have the same thing. Anytime I master a subject, I’ve mastered it because I’ve taught it to other people along the way. That’s how I learn things. But they don’t always know how to build a WordPress website. So they have, they struggle actually creating that, bringing the two together. I can imagine a future where we adopt a bit of a two sided marketplace element to our platform. I’m not quite sure if that’s going to be a paid thing or if it’s more of a community building exercise. I don’t want to charge for that specifically because I want to bring the people together and don’t necessarily want to make money out of that. But I think it’s, I think it’s always a good thing when technical people and people with a teaching desire come together because that’s when everybody improves. Chris Badgett: Just to build on that. I have a, this five hats challenge. I call it where you have to wear five hats in this industry. One of those is to be a technologist, one of them is to be a teacher or instructional designer. I call it one of them is to be a subject matter expert, like with some deep knowledge on something. Another thing is to be a community builder. And then the, final one is to be an entrepreneur, like actually create a business, do marketing, if you want to scale, build a team and stuff like that. It’s very hard to find all that in one person. Partnerships, connecting teachers and technologists with people that are good at building community with people that are like, even like you want to teach on a topic that you’re passionate about, but there’s these experts that are even bigger. Have even more knowledge than you. And just connecting all that together is where you make the best stuff. Roger Rosweide: I agree. I’m unsure if I actually possess the five hats right now. Nobody does. Chris Badgett: That’s the dirty little secret of the industry. I found is that that’s so rare. The bet, the people that are the most successful with LFTR as an example, there’s often like a couple people or three people and they’re sharing the hats. They’re not doing it alone, completely alone. Though what I think is what’s cool about wild cloud is it takes that technology burden off the table. Like you’re letting technology where the hat and you get the the benefits of WordPress while having the SAS experience is, awesome. Roger Rosweide: That’s something I almost say on a not maybe daily, but almost weekly basis is people often ask us if you’ll, if we also do email and we don’t because email is very hard and there’s other people that do email really well. Chris Badgett: But at the same time, you mean, or Roger Rosweide: No like, for example, we host sites. So people expect us to host email as well. But if you buy your domain, yeah, exactly like Gmail and we don’t because Gmail is there and we have the G suite. So why would we improve on the G suite? But it’s the same thing with WordPress, because why would you build your own Kajabi if you can get an LMS, if you can get Lyft or LMS, why would you try to do your own SEO if you can get Rank Math or Yoast, I hope you do Yoast. Because he’s an investor but and I think that’s not, it doesn’t only just help you get to the first level, which is get the product, but it’s also, it delegates the burden of maintaining and optimizing and improving it. And I think it, it’s more fun if you do it in such a community manner because it’s. I speak to a lot of product founders. I make it my job to, and you would be surprised, especially in the WordPress community, how many of them are focused on their customers. Just the other week, I heard the owner of WP Umbrella say that they have made a religion out of being customer centric. Like they’re so passionate about. So letting their roadmap be decided by the customer requests. And they’re completely subservient to what the customer wants. How cool is that? How cool is it that you can just go to Yoast and actually ask if they could do this one thing. And in most cases, they’ll definitely consider and maybe even build it because it’s a good use case. I think that’s, that helps you put more hats on or delegate those hats. Chris Badgett: Yeah, and also the WordPress versus Kajabi as an example. The WordPress community is so massive that there’s just a larger bank of people solving problems than work at one SAS company, even something big like Shopify there’s, way more innovation happening. Inside of the WordPress ecosystem, because of the law of large numbers, how many people are like just working on e commerce or LMS or SEO? It’s a, you get to benefit from that. That’s cool. Roger Rosweide: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And you’re in control, which I think is a pretty big thing and something people shouldn’t underestimate. The fact that if you’re on a Shopify or a Webflow site and they just decide to up the price, then that’s it for you. Chris Badgett: I had this funny thought talking to you. Which is, I remember listening to an interview with Toby from Shopify, the founder. And he was saying their mission is to arm the rebels basically against Amazon, the small sellers, but then this wild cloud is like arming the rebels again. But it’s it’s, just that’s innovation. That’s disruption. It’s, bringing the power to the people and. It’s a, it’s really cool. And that’s what I think the physics of business just flow that way. And that’s why WordPress has been successful on the macro. Roger Rosweide: I agree with you. And I, it’s not necessarily our mission or strategy to oppose any of the proprietary SaaS builders. But at some point what’s that quote, I think from Batman, like you live long enough to become the villain. Oh, and then, so the thing is the thing that made you grow is your innovative power and in the case of SaaS companies. It is all due to the fact that they have multi tenancy at the core of how they build the product. The only way to build a SaaS is if you can ship. New features to all of your customers at the same time all the SaaS companies are built that way. So if, so that was not the problem for Shopify was to build their own CMS, but now they’ve basically kept that multi tenant architecture for themselves. They’re the only ones using it. So if you’re an agency building sites on Shopify. There’s no real way to manage and maintain them the same way Shopify is maintaining their platform. And we’ve basically taken that architecture and, introduce it to WordPress, giving people all the power that Shopify has, but you build it with your own WordPress skills. And I think at levels of playing field, I think it makes it easier for smaller agencies to compete with Shopify. Our, like I said, our customers position themselves as Shopify alternatives successfully. Because you can still remain a relatively small agency and with relatively small, I would say 50 to a hundred customers, which is very easily maintainable on our platform. Whilst at the same time, still know the first names of all of your customers and be able to provide personal service. And that’s something that I think in this day and age. I still really appreciate going to my local coffee shop and them knowing my order as soon as I step in, I really liked that. And I’d love my SAS provider to have a similar approach. But in this economy of scale that just isn’t feasible for Shopify, but it is feasible for an agency utilizing multi tenant architecture. So I hope to achieve that. Chris Badgett: Well said. Even me, Roger is a long term WordPress person and technology guy. I’ve learned a lot on this conversation. And, but I know some people out there, they might, who are listening to this right now. May still be a little bit new to the game of websites as a service, multi tenancy, SaaS or software as a solution, but they’ve heard this conversation and they’re excited. But they want to learn more and dig in to what you offer it at wild cloud. There’s the website wildcloud. com, but do you have any particular resources or places for people to go to like really dig into the opportunity? Roger Rosweide: Of course. If you wait one more week, we’ll have the Lifter Cloud Blueprint live. So we’ll invite everybody to get on our platform, start a free trial, no credit card required. We don’t put up a paywall to make it hard for you. We just want you to try it out. Feel free to get in touch with our customer service. It immediately goes to the founders. We want, we need to see everybody. And, see what they’re, what they think. But I actually try to be as approachable as I can, because I do understand that we’re introducing something new. And people often want to talk to a person that they’ve heard somewhere online. If you’re watching this, you can see my first and last name, which is Roger Rosweide. If you type that into LinkedIn, you’ll find me if you connect to me. I’d be happy to have a conversation. If you’re listening to this, then I hope you can look at the show notes and still decipher my name. But in any case, if you sign up for a free trial on our platform and you ask for me specifically, I’ll get in touch with you because I, definitely I’m, curious and I feel like an ambassador of this. Business model. And I want to promote it to as many people as I can. Chris Badgett: Yeah, that’s awesome. Yeah. I think there is an education component for people that kind of onboard into the, Oh, Roger Rosweide: for sure. SAAS. Yeah. We’ve got like multiple webinars we’ve got. Yeah. We’ll, everything is on the website. Chris Badgett: Awesome. Awesome. Roger, this has been an excellent conversation. Again, I wish I could go back in time and do, wild clouds. Think about productized service, picking my niche providing those. That website in addition to the services as a value to the client. So go to wildcloud. com, check it out. We’re recording this on October 16th. So depending upon when you listen to this. Roger Rosweide: The lift. Oh, it’s live then. Chris Badgett: Oh we are live right now. Roger Rosweide: No. Like when people listen to this, not live they’ll, be able to get again on the lifter cloud thing is immediately. Oh, that’s great. I’m happy to hear that. Chris Badgett: Yeah. So that’ll go, check it out on wildcloud. com. Thanks for coming on the show, Roger. I love your energy and you’re in the innovative way you think about helping people and adding more value. Any final words for the people before we sign off? Roger Rosweide: No, man, I’ve got some final words for you, which is thank you for having me on. I love that. Chris Badgett: Yeah, you’re welcome. I look forward to doing it again with you down the road. Cool. Roger Rosweide: Sounds good. 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 at LifterLMS. Go to lifterlms. com forward slash 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 Create a Recurring Revenue Online Education WaaS with Roger Rosweide from Wildcloud appeared first on LMScast.