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Josh Hall describes how he developed Web Designer Pro into a platform for business education that aids web designers in starting, expanding, and scaling their companies. He describes how he provides courses, community, coaching, and a high-level mastermind to members at three distinct stages builders, growers, and scalers. Understanding people’s actual pain spots, assisting them in moving through various stages, and fostering an atmosphere where members feel understood and supported are key components of effective coaching and community building, according to a main subject of the discussion.

Josh also discusses the importance of in-person events and community development. He describes how ProCon grew from a tiny get-together to an annual gathering where web designers can network, learn, have fun, and form sincere connections. He places a strong emphasis on starting off simply, allowing for impromptu interactions, and fostering an environment that values independence, diligence, and having fun. He provides examples of members who, just by meeting in person, were able to find business prospects, collaborations, and deeper friendships.

Coaching and overcoming impostor syndrome is another important subject. According to Josh, a coach does not always have to be more skilled than the person they are mentoring. Rather, a skilled coach can recognize issues, pinpoint blind spots, learn from past mistakes, and expedite a person’s progress.

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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

Chris Badgett: Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m joined by a special guest, he’s back on the show, it’s my friend Josh Hall. I think this might be his third appearance. Josh runs Web Designer Pro. You can find that at webdesignerpro.com. A fun story, I think the first time I ever did my own migration of one WordPress site to somewhere else, I followed Josh’s video click by click, and then figured that out as a non-developer myself.

But I’ve gotten to know Josh over the years, and he serves some of the people that we are and that we work with, which is people who build websites for clients, web design, web designers, website agencies. His whole focus is on web designer professionals. Welcome back to the show, Josh. 

Josh Hall: Ah, it is so good to see you again, Chris.

I didn’t know that you watched that video, which funny enough, is my n- most popular YouTube video on my channel, which is how to manually migrate WordPress for when inevitably a plugin breaks or times out, so who knew? I did that video, it’s 20 minutes. I just ripped it out, put it together. I had no idea that was gonna be the number one video on my channel.

I think there’s well over a half million views now on that. 

Chris Badgett: As a marketer, whenever I need to fix something on my house, I’m like, “Oh how do I change this part of a toilet or fix this?” And you go to this YouTube channel of somebody with just holding their phone and it’s got 10 million views.

You did that for something in the WordPress ecosystem. Yeah. It’s so cool. It’s so cool.

Josh Hall: It’s funny too because I am not a super techy guy, but I think that’s what helped in that case, is usually when you learn from developers, it’s “Oh my God, that was so over my head. I don’t know what he said.”

But I’m a simple dude, and I just explained it in the simplistic way that I understood it, and it just happened to work. That actually taught me a lot with how to teach, is like I don’t need to teach like an expert, I just teach like I do it, for better or for worse, so 

Chris Badgett: Problem and pain, n- not, I don’t like seeing people in pain, but as a marketer or product creator or offer creator, you really need to know a pain.

Yeah. And in marketing, you have permission to spread your wings a little bit like you did with okay, I’m gonna show people how to migrate a site. Oh, wow, you found like a massive pain point that millions of people all over the earth are trying to figure out and there’s just not enough good content on that, and you just nailed it.

Josh Hall: You know what my second biggest… This wasn’t a v- it is a video, but the blog post gets way more traffic than the video, and it is How to create a circle on p- the program preview on Mac. 

Chris Badgett: Okay. 

Josh Hall: It’s like niche. Like the most hyper, like here’s how to do this. So yeah, you just, obviously that wasn’t ideal for the strategy of bringing people into Web Designer Pro long term, but hey good use case, so yeah.

Chris Badgett: Good numbers on YouTube. Let’s start there. Let’s stay on pain since we’re talking about pain. And again, I love pain, but only when I can solve it. When you look at the Web Designer Pro, you have courses, coaching, and community for your type of person I look at pain like there’s like a main pain, and then under that there’s like a family of related pains.

And it doesn’t always have to be that structure, but what is the main pain that Web Designer Pro aims to solve, and what are the cluster of other pain points? 

Josh Hall: So I would group them into three different pains. Okay. So in Web Designer Pro, this has taken a lot of years of refinement, by the way. So you had mentioned before we hit live that my site is super clear and concise right now.

That is years of hard work to get to this point. But we’ve identified that there’s really three buckets of members: builders, growers, and scalers. The builders are the folks who are just that. They’re building their web design agency. They may be new or they may be in their first couple years of business.

They really need mostly the courses first, and then some community support, and then different levels of coaching, but I don’t really wanna one-on-one privately coach people who are, like, just trying to figure out how to get clients. So I would bucket them as the builders. They, their biggest pain point is, yeah, just really getting their business off the ground and actually just building a business, truthfully.

So again, my, my courses are kinda well-suited for that. The growers are the next bucket. Those are the folks who are generally making, 50, 60, 70 grand, and most of them wanna get to a six-figure range. They maybe have a side hustle or their business is growing. Most likely they’re like me and they accidentally started a business.

They didn’t know what they were getting into, just like most web designers, and now they’re like, “Oh, my gosh. This is getting serious, so I wanna be a professional. I’m growing, but I can’t manage this growth.” So their biggest pain point is typically things like offers, price point, and really just solidifying what they have and get clarity on where they wanna go.

And a little bit of coaching can help them, but often what helps them mostly is community support. So the Web Designer Pro community is really an ideal fit for them. And then there’s the scalers. That’s the third piece, which is these are the folks who are at a six or multi six-figure level.

They’ve built an incredible business, and now they’re at the point where the business is running them and they’re not running their business. And I’ve learned that at this stage of my coaching career I’ve become a better and better coach for folks at this level who really just wanna get time and freedom back.

So those three categories are really where now Web Designer Pro can meet them where they are. And that’s really helped, having the courses, community, and coaching, ’cause I can say, “Look, if you’re a beginner or you’re in your first couple years of business and you just, you need clients and you’re trying to figure out your offers, tr- start with the courses.

That’ll get to, get you to the point where you’re ready to be a grower and come into the community, and we’ll help you get to six figures, and then I will personally guide you much more intensively when you are at six figures and ready to scale that beyond.” So that’s kinda where we landed. 

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome.

I love it too ’cause it’s a little bit counter to the advice of “Oh you should just create your offer for scalers, people that are already successful,” and all this. But you think more fourth dimensionally through time. Yeah. And in theory, somebody could come in and start as a builder, then a grower, and then a scaler, and you’ve got a customer for years.

I 

Josh Hall: mean- Oh, dude, we have members- Yeah … who have literally gone through the entire ladder in two or three years. And I think- That’s awesome … and they’re some of our best ca- Actually, I’m wearing this shirt from Alexia, who designed … who is on retainer with me now for her agency. She designed our in-person event swag this year.

She’s one of our rockstar members. She is in year two, not even … She just passed full-time in her business one year. She’s already on track for six figures this year. And, if I were only serving the people at a higher end level, which there’s a world where that’s perfect for certain people, but I kinda, I like it, man.

I like … If I can find a rockstar who is, who I can tell is gonna do it, then I wanna be able to give them the path to success and succeed. But interestingly enough, like I’m gonna start doing some community building coaching, and on that side of things, because it’s more of a soon-to-be passion project, I am gonna start high level.

And I will- I just don’t have the time or bandwidth to create a whole nother business for beginners. So on that front, I will start high-ticket coaching, high-level coaching, just with a few. But for Web Designer Pro, I love having all three. Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: There’s a really good lesson in there. I think people get really kinda confused with the customer avatar or ideal customer profile thing.

And it sounds like with you, Did you say her name was Alexa? 

Josh Hall: Alexia. 

Chris Badgett: Alexia. The best customer avatar is somebody you actually know and worked with. So I don’t know if she’s like the ideal, and maybe it’s an amalgamation of several people like that. But just because Alexia may be like one of your favorite ideal members, went through the full thing in two years, and got super successful, and is now a brand evangelist, you…

It doesn’t mean everybody’s gonna be like that. You’re gonna pick up some scalers who are… just need help, they’re maxed out, or just a pure beginner who maybe doesn’t make it all the way to the scaling stage or… So y- you don’t have to… I think people get confused, like no, everybody in here is not an identical twin, but, the perfect fit- Yeah

is somebody like Alexia or whatever. 

Josh Hall: And that’s a great point, Chris. ‘Cause I think when you think about either a course or a community or a coaching program, or all three together in my case, I think you need to think about, like, where are they gonna go after they hit a certain level? So if you have a really tight customer avatar and they grow past your program, then the question would be do they graduate and is the goal for them to move on to something else or do you wanna have some sort of platform that helps them continue to grow?

And that’s really what I’ve turned Web Designer Pro into, which is if you’re brand new but you’re a freaking rock star you’re welcome on in. And we don’t have a application process, but it’s just worked out well to where the folks who are gonna succeed just naturally graduate up to the community tier when they’re ready on their terms.

But I had some members who have told me in the past “I kinda got to the scaler level and now I wondered, what’s next? What’s after that?” Actually, really funny, right before this, I had a podcast interview with one of my members who actually started as a grower. He was stuck at a couple years at the 70 to 80K range per year, and he just couldn’t quite, quite get to six figures.

And he told me he wanted to bust through the floor to see a new ceiling. Yeah. And that’s why he joined Pro. And I was like, “That’s really cool,” ’cause that’s not verbiage that I came up with, but enough podcast interviews and success stories and clarity in our offer made him feel like, “Yeah I’m ready to be a scaler now.”

So yeah I, it’s… and it’s not for everybody. I think if you have a really clear avatar and it’s just a point A to point B, that’s probably more of a course and a cohort, I would guess. Whereas a community, yeah I like … I really like having the full experience, the full journey.

That’s kinda what I’m catering to, which is not easy, and it has evolved to get to this place. And I think for anyone who checked out some of our first conversations I actually started as just a one-time, one-off course creator. And I didn’t have an offer for coaching or for, any sort of growth past that.

But that was fine for then, but now this is my full-time deal. I am 100% a coach and a community builder. So yeah, I wanted to have those next level offers for them. 

Chris Badgett: Since we’re talking about the people you serve, or the avatar, whatever web designers, you’re a web designer, I was a web designer. I know a lot of web designers.

I really like web designers. And I, you… I feel like you can’t do what you’ve done if you don’t love your customer. And you’re almost like… I heard a great coach once say, they believe in you more than you believe in yourself, and it’s not hyperbole, it’s literally true. 

Josh Hall: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: And they’re, like, helping you uncover blocks. But what do 

Josh Hall: you think- Can I- 

Chris Badgett: Go ahead. 

Josh Hall: Real quick on that, Chris, just before I forget it. This was early on, first year of Web Designer Pro back in 2020. But I had a member, Jacob, I’ll never forget him he was just… He was struggling. He a lot of personal stuff going on at the same time, but he was such a good developer and such a good designer.

And we worked together for a while, and he went from basically ha- making no income the first half of the year. And then all of a sudden he got, I think it was like a $17,000 build. Yeah. And then he got a bunch of other wins off that. And I reme- I’ll never forget this. He sent me a video literally in tears, and he said, “I just needed someone to believe in me.”

Chris Badgett: Yeah. 

Josh Hall: And that was just it really is a testament to what you said. Yeah, when you go through it and you know the journey, you have not a fake belief, it’s like a, “Listen, I know you can do this” kind of thing. Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah, that’s super powerful. And it’s no surprise you had that story because, you have longevity.

You’ve been around for a long time. You can feel it in your brand, and even in your energy on this podcast. But what are some of the things that make web designers special? I’ll rattle off a few and pass it over to you. And I’m speaking as a web designer, like former agency guy. I think we can all relate to this where, the client hires you to build a website, and then by the end you feel like the CEO.

They’re asking you for business advice advice about services you don’t even offer, doing business strategy with you. So basically the way I think about that is web designers are, like, some of the most helpful, caring people on the planet. There’s a dark side to that, which is they can be taken advantage of.

Josh Hall: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: And, do things like where the client expectations are too high, or they don’t pay the invoice, or I don’t know. Just so there is a, a dark side to it, but the great bright side is these people are so smart, so creative, so helpful, good listeners, and good collaborators. It’s a special crop of people in the world.

Josh Hall: I could not agree more. Yeah. I love web designers. And I think- Yeah. What makes web designers so awesome? I think a lot of it is if you think about web design there’s an element of creativity and craftsmanship that goes into it that you don’t see in a lot of other industries. If you’re gonna be a realtor, I don’t know if realtors think

And nothing against realtors. We need them. I love my realtor. She’s freaking awesome. But I don’t know if they think about their work as a craftsman. I don’t know if they’re like … I don’t know if they’re thinking about the work they do like that, whereas web designers, we do. We really care about our work.

Really good web designers end up s- using that same energy for their clients and really caring about their clients and their results, which is gonna impact their work, and becomes a win-win. I think there’s a lot of … I think there’s craft and creativity in web design that is unique for web designers compared to other industries.

I also think the personality type of that lends itself to being, like, unique people. When I think about most web designers, and I found this, I know we’ll probably talk about our in-person event, but oh, I’m getting chills just thinking about ProCon, our in-person event, because it’s … It reminds me of, and other members have said this, it’s like the coolest people in your high school that are all chill and down to earth, no ego, no weird jock preppiness, or, you know no bullies.

There’s just, … It’s just … Imagine if you had a school of just all really cool people. And yes, there’s differences. There’s uniqueness. Yeah. With web designers, you’re gonna get some introversion. You’re gonna get some oddities. You’re gonna get some nerds. You’re g- you’re gonna get all the things.

But and you’re gonna get some partiers. I fall a little more into that camp. But it is, … You don’t get the, like … You don’t get as many corporate pe- Yeah. I think that’s what it is. You don’t get as much mainstream- Yeah … corporate genericness. You get, yeah, unique creativity and a lot of yeah, just a lot of cool people.

So I think all those things make web designers different, and that’s … I absolutely love serving web designers. Yes, I was a web designer for a decade, so I know the pain points. I remember vividly all the big challenges that I have, so it’s easy for me to speak on those, and I have the real-world experience of the, the literal scars and hairline receding before I made that manual migration video to prove it.

But yeah those are just a few. I could probably take a whole hour talking why I love web designers, but those are a few that come to mind. 

Chris Badgett: I love the saying about community when you’re designing it, but also when you’re just creating a, an offer for a certain type of person, the vibe you want them to experience, like, when they first show up to your ProCon in-person event, or even a Zoom meeting, or even social media group, or where- wherever you’re hanging out, is there’s this feeling called finding the others.

And that’s what it feels like when- I don’t know. As a web designers, there’s a limit to how much your non-web design friends or your partner wanna hear you talk about JPEGs and pixels and responsive design and marketing automation and white space or whatever. It’s but when you find yourself in the company of all these other weirdos who are weird in exactly the same way you are, it’s the feeling of finding the others, which is so cool and you design community aspect, not just content.

So- Yeah … tell us about how you shape that. ‘Cause I feel like between courses, coaching, and community design is the least well understood. 

Josh Hall: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: So what’s your- Yeah, 

Josh Hall: it’s true. Yeah. And it’s, and it can be really hard too, just because… and it will evolve, I will say. Web Designer Pro is a continual i- innovate- it’s continual innovation, continual, not change, but definitely e- evolving.

And I think overall the biggest thing I learned with setting the culture, I guess I would… Would you call it culture- Yeah … of community? I think- Yeah. And 

Chris Badgett: it starts with the culture of the founder.

Josh Hall: That’s- 

Chris Badgett: Yeah … that’s how it starts, but then it takes on a life of its own. 

Josh Hall: That is so true.

Your vibe attracts your tribe. That, I think that may be, like, the most important quote when it comes to being a community builder of some sorts. And yeah, I’m pretty clear and up front about, I don’t have a mission statement or values per se, but in my podcast, which is my number one attractor to Web Designer Pro, is that, the f- the tagline of my podcast, The Web Design Business podcast, is helping you build your web design business that gives you freedom and a lifestyle you love.

So that right there, and I end up using that for the tagline and heading for Web Designer Pro, because I really want people to come in who are, yes, driven, and they’re down to hustle a little bit and to work hard. We are hard workers. We know this isn’t easy. We are gonna work our asses off, but we’re gonna have fun doing it, and we’re doing it for freedom.

And freedom may look like me. I’ve got three kids, I have a daughter with special needs. I don’t wanna work generally more than 30 to 35 hours a week. Definitely no more than 40 unless I’m in a hustle season. And I’ve attracted a lot of people who are freedom-based entrepreneurs. Those people tend to be super cool.

Yeah. I did have one member I remember a couple years ago join, and he was a kind of a bro hustler, and he just said, “I wanna… I don’t have any experience in this, but I wanna build a seven-figure agency this year.” And I’m like I’m not a good fit for you, dude. I think you should go to f- find another offer.

This is not who I serve.” So yeah it’s interesting, I think from a po- it’s alm- almost like positioning. You gotta… To get the right culture in a community, you need to make sure you’re positioned to attract the right people. So I would actually, before thinking about culture, think about positioning on who are you attracting?

Where are you attracting? What does your messaging look like? What are your channels on where you’re getting people? There’s a reason that I don’t play the social media game. My social media following is piddly compared to other people in my space, but I just made a million dollars with my community in five and a half years, and the culture is incredible.

And I’m… I have the most freedom-based schedule around it, and that is a very intentional design to where I’d rather work with a couple hundred people in the main community areas and have the pricing be according to what my family needs to take home and, be able to have other avenues for revenue.

But yeah, the, the culture is freedom. Work hard, make money, have fun, freedom. Maybe there’s my new tagline, but that’s kinda… That’s what I’ve learned. And before we even get into community design of the spaces and the other things, it’s like I think those are the most important things to really think through first 

Chris Badgett: I love that.

You probably agree with me here, but I f- one of the things I feel is super AI-proof is YouTube and podcasts, which you do both of those. People pr- particularly for educational content, they don’t wanna watch AI generated videos. B- and the same for listening, going on a run or washing the dishes they wanna hear Josh Hall, not a AI robot ElevenLabs voice for an hour or whatever.

But let’s dial it back to community. Tell us about the in-person event. That’s a … In WordPress as an example, I went to something called CaboPress that Chris Lema put on a long time ago, and that was my first time as a web designer getting out from behind my computer. I’d never been to a WordPress WordCamp or anything.

I might’ve been to one WordPress meetup. Yeah. And I got on a plane, I flew to Mexico, and I had this experience of meeting, finding the others, and I was like … And it, my current business partner, my lead developer, all met around that conference, which I went back to multiple years in a row. Yeah. And it was small.

It was only 30, 40 people there. It wasn’t a giant conference. But anyways, you designed ProCon. Why’d you do it? How’d you do it? How did it work out? 

Josh Hall: I always knew I wanted to do an in-person event just ’cause similarly I had some experiences both at WordCamps and other web design meetups where I’m like, “Oh my God, this is incredible,” to, like you said, to not have to burden my family and my wife with the, security issues of WordPress or whatever it was awesome to just, yeah to meet your tribe, to be with your people who understand you and are moving in a similar direction.

And so when I started Web Designer Pro in 2020, important context here is that I had already had courses. I had at that point over 1,000 students in my one-off courses, and Web Designer Pro really started as a coaching community, so courses were not in it at first. But I did not … I basically built it on the side and just got used to building online community in a intensive way, a more, like, true online community, not a big Facebook group, and in coaching.

I really wanted to get- Good with community and coaching before I did an in-person event be- and quite frankly, I’ve heard so many horror stories about how costly in-person stuff is. And it is. It is. It’s not, especially if you’re gonna bring, in our case, 40 to 50 people into Columbus, Ohio, there’s a lot of planning and cost that goes along with that.

So I really wasn’t in a place to be able to do an official event the first few years really. But in 2023, so three years into building Web Designer Pro, and then eventually putting courses, community coaching all together there was a WordCamp in Washington, DC, 2023. I think you were at that one, right?

We just didn’t- I 

Chris Badgett: was. 

Josh Hall: Unfortunately, we did not meet, which is an absolute shame. How the hell have we not met in person? 

Chris Badgett: I don’t know. That is- Are you going to WordCamp Europe? I’ll be in Spain.

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Josh Hall: No. 

Chris Badgett: In the spring, I think. 

Josh Hall: Man, one day. Hopefully US we can get together, or maybe I’ll have you come to ProCon next year.

Yeah. That would be real fun. Yeah. But but we did, what we did essentially was a meetup. We did a Web Designer Pro meetup at WordCamp, and there was, I think, 9 or 10 of us that were there attending WordCamp, and we tacked on a private dinner together. And we basic- That was really the only thing that was structured, was just a dinner.

A bunch of us went out afterwards, we went to a few bars, and then everyone was meeting up sporadically around that, and it was incredible. Yeah. It was like some of these people h- were founding members. We’ve been working together for three years, some of us. Some of them were students of mine from previous to that.

And I remember one member, Sandy, told me her story again just about in tears about how she was literally walking into this agency or somebody she was working with to say, “I’m done with web design. I can’t stand it.” And this person was like before you quit, have you tried this c- tool called Divi?”

And then she looked up Divi tutorials, and I had just started my YouTube channel doing Divi tutorials, and then eventually she took my course, became a founding member of Pro. She’s still in Pro today. Wow. Literally a decade later, Chris. An incredible story. And she told me that, and I was like

First of all, so I was like, “Why didn’t you ever tell me that? How have you not told me? That’s incredible.” But, you get these interactions, and you hear the stories, and you really … You, as one of our members said about ProCon, you go from 2D to 3D when you meet in person. Yeah. So that experience completely solidified the deal for me that okay, we are, we’re not just gonna go to a WordCamp and do a meetup.

We are gonna do an event. Ended up taking a couple years from that until I, we got to the place where I was, like, really ready to go for it. And in 2025, we did our first event. And we had, at that point, I think we had 30, 30 to 35 members all together with a couple plus ones and sponsors, and it was it was almost like a religious experience for myself and so many members of Pro, because at that point it was a lot of firsts.

The second round that we just did the event a few months ago, in a lot of ways it felt like a reunion because so many people from the first round came there. But the first one had a unique feeling because it was, like, the first, and it… Neither one was better than the other. In some ways I enjoyed the first year more than the second, in some ways I enjoyed the second more than the first.

But it was the first time where there was a dedicated Web Designer Pro large group of 30-plus people, and there is a feeling when somebody travels somewhere for your thing. Or in our case everyone felt like they were basically just going to meet their friends. So it was incredible. It was remarkable.

And then this, the second year we just did it here in the spring of 2026, and it was even better from a standpoint of we learned a lot in the first year, leveled up a lot with just making things better all around from merch and swag to event coordination and even things like how to use Circle, which is what com- what Web Designer Pro is run on, how to put the, the event group chat at the top of the app when we’re live at the event so people don’t need to scroll down to the bottom.

Little things like that were really improved upon and and now I’m like, I’m so an in-person event guy. And there, it just, it gives you a buzz that carries over for months. I’m still buzzing literally thinking about so many of the, the conversations I had with that many people. We all blew our voices out, which is awesome, and the really cool thing is we had four girls who stayed with each other the first event.

They stayed at an Airbnb instead of the hotel I would have never paired those four up. I would have never thought. They’re all on different stages in business. I actually didn’t know if their personalities would connect or clash. And they ha- they still have a group chat with each other to this day, two years later, and they are, like, super close.

They even have a pretend podcast that they they joked about starting together. In person just opens up this whole other level of connection, for sure growth and possibilities, inspiration, encouragement, and as a community builder, retention. So of course there’s a, the big pull on that is yes it’s costly, and my motto is even if I break even, that’s cool.

I know it’s gonna be worthwhile long term for our community. Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: I’m not a very left brain guy. I can do left brain stuff, but r- the u- it’s a left brain concept that there’s equity in relationships. It’s not about making money from the event, it’s about building relationships, not just to you, but between each other at the thing.

I wanna unpack everything you said just like, ’cause I’ve seen this movie before when people design communities, and you mentioned so many good best practices. The first thing you mentioned is when you understand your avatar you know that oh a lot of my people are gonna be at this WordCamp.

So you tag on to an event that’s already happening. They already have plane tickets, and you get comfortable with it. You test the waters. I’m assuming you might have bought dinner or maybe everybody chipped in or something. I don’t know. But you- 

Josh Hall: I, the only, yeah, the only thing I paid for on that one was dinner.

Yeah, exactly. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. 

Josh Hall: I would recommend everyone start out like that if you can, just because, yeah, it’s, it is i- I think the worst thing that you could do is try to go too big and too fast. And then, like I’m not gonna say the creator, but I have a friend who was involved w- with this big entrepreneur who did this huge event.

On the outside it looked amazing. It was like this first big event for this, this well-known entrepreneur. They lost like almost 100 grand on that event. And of course, I knew I wasn’t gonna be at that level where there’s 2,000 or 3,000 people, but I was certainly not at the point financially where I could even lose really any money.

So yeah, start small. I l- I love the meetup first approach. Keep it… Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: Next thing you did, which I’ve seen a lot, and people have some, I don’t know if it’s imposter syndrome or what, but it’s keep it simple. My first event, they’re gonna fly to me. You said Columbus, Ohio, which is where you live. I’ve seen people do this in rural Canada, and they’re like, “Nobody’s gonna…”

People fly from other continents, sometimes. 

Josh Hall: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: And it’s, So that’s a pro tip. Any pro tips about your first one by your hometown? I think there’s a airport near you. There’s probably hotels that already have infrastructure for group rates, and conference rooms, and audio/video, or whatever.

But any of those kind of tips? 

Josh Hall: Yeah. All, all those things were factored in. It’s one reason why I took a couple years to really think through it. And I did create… One thing that was really helpful as well is I actually put almost a little mini mastermind to- almost like an event mastermind together of a couple colleagues I know.

You’ve spoke with Shannon Mattern, right? 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. 

Josh Hall: Yeah. So she’s local to me. We’re in a mastermind together, and I knew that she did an event for her high-level group. Different, very different, because they go to a beach and do it that way. But she had a lot of good insight about these are the things to think about, factor in.

She’s like, “Food is always three times more expensive than you think.” So there was all that stuff that was really helpful. And yeah, as far as thinking through the event, I’m really fortunate, because Columbus, Ohio is freaking awesome. Have you ever been to Columbus? 

Chris Badgett: I have not. 

Josh Hall: So- Columbus is kinda like a mini Chicago, mini Austin to where it is, it’s a big city, but it is absolutely super manageable to get around.

And yeah, the airport’s super close by. There’s plenty of hotels downtown. There’s also, in walking distance, plenty of things to do right downtown by the hotel that I chose for our event space. So there’s we have a minor league baseball team. We have the Blue Jackets, the NHL team. We have a minor league soccer team, and they’re all right there in this little district.

I wanted a place originally where ideally people could go, and they could never have to Uber if they- Yeah, that’s smart … they really didn’t want to. So Columbus just happened to be, fortunately a really good fit for that. Now, there’s other ways to build an event out that’s a little more rural, depending on what it looks like.

Or in like Shannon’s case, more of like a retreat that is- … specific to maybe a couple groups or a smaller group that’s sharing a house or something like that. But I knew I knew I wanted to have those few things in mind, which was I wanted a space that had a decent size event space. Not huge, not like a hall, but like a decent event space that had catering options.

And our baseball team is an incredible stadium, and they have a bunch of suites there. So I knew, I thought about wanted to do that. I wanted to have some sort of social component that wasn’t just “Hey, everyone. Show up here and let’s get to work.” I really, I wanted… And I, actually the event structure just for context was technically on the books, Friday night is the baseball game, group social.

It’s covered in your ticket. Food and the suite is covered. And then Saturday, full day workshop. So 10:00 to 4:00 officially with lunch that’s catered in between there, and then a private dinner for all of us. So their ticket covers those three main things, and that’s the programming of the event.

But as you probably well know and anyone else who goes to event, most of my favorite things happened in and outside of that, which were the meetups, the people coming early- You know, we have a really good time for the folks who are the night crew. We did karaoke. This last time, six of us were out till 3:00 AM just ’cause

I’ve got three kids, I never get to do that, so my wife and I were with a few members, and we were literally getting pizza at 3:30 in the morning. It was freaking awesome. So it was a mix of professional workshop, but also casual social, and also completely, off the cuff, if you come early, awesome, we’ll try to meet up, kind of thing.

I think I derailed m- us from the question, but that wa- that was the structure of the event and why Columbus was a really good fit. 

Chris Badgett: That’s perfect. That’s perfect. The next thing, you didn’t say it explicitly, but I’m pretty sure it worked this way, is you didn’t try to do all that you just said and carry all the presentation.

For example- Yeah … you had Sh- Shannon help with just figuring out event, like … So it’s not a solo act. Yeah. And then I think you probably had other experts facilitating things or giving talks or whatever. So tell us a little bit 

Josh Hall: about that. Yeah. Yeah, it was actually, the first year was, like, so easy on my part, ’cause I literally, I p- I prepared some slides for the speakers, and then my end of the first event was really just to be the emcee.

Okay. Yeah. It was so easy for me because, yeah I basic- we did put a frame on the actual workshop, but the first year was the, the frame of a revenue boost. So I was like, “I want people to come here and feel like they’re leaving with some really good ideas and strategies to boost their revenue.”

So yeah, we had Shannon did a talk on pricing. My friend Jason Gracia has the most productized model on web design, so he spoke. He actually did a mock sales call, and I was his … And we did not rehearse this, but I just, I was his mock client. I wore a mustache, and- … my name was Jim Shorts, and it, that was really fun.

And he just took us through his sales process, and we were all mouth agape mind blown with how he does that. We had one of our speakers speak. So it was really cool. That first year was a little more like that. One thing … And then I did a live Q&A coaching session at the end of that first year.

But one thing I did hear back with feedback from the first group was they really wanted more time to implement some stuff live and have some breakout sessions. It was really just a lot of live workshops stacked on each other. So the second year, we only did a few live workshops, and then we spent quite a bit of time with a big extended breakout session, where each table were their own little mastermind groups, and we would kick off with a topic, and then dig into that per group.

It wa- I’m excited for this next one in 2027 because I really wanna learn more about that and do breakout groups and little mastermind stuff better. It was really good. I felt like it was a little just loosey-goosey. Which ended up being fine, but I know we could tighten that up and make that a better experience for all the members.

So that’s what I’m personally looking forward to learning more about, and I’m actually going to an event. I’m a part of Jay Clouse’s community, The Lab. Which is like Web Designer Pro, but just for creators. They’re doing an event actually in Columbus now- Okay … the month before. So I’m an attendee there.

I’m gonna buy a ticket and go to that event, mainly to learn and just be an observer about how they do that event, ’cause I know they do the breakout groups really well. So I’m actually gonna learn from that and immediately apply it to our community the, the month after. So I’m looking forward to that.

But yeah, to your point, yeah, it was… You know me I really viewed it as like I’m… People learn from me enough in the courses, in the podcast, everything else. Here, I wanna be connection, community builder, and emcee, basically. I’m not the star of the show at ProCon. It’s the people. 

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome.

Josh Hall: And- Another- Oh, sorry. Go ahead. The last thing that we did this year was my wife actually joined us for a live Q&A, ’cause everyone has been wanting my wife to come on the podcast for years. Just not… She is, does not like the, the light on her, the camera on her. Yeah. But I figured, let’s just make it the most intimidating thing and just bring her up and do the live Q&A in front of 40-some people, but it was awesome. It was really cool to do that. 

Chris Badgett: Very cool. Another thing you said was, like, the reunion element. Yeah. Typically, I see something like, I don’t know, maybe 50% retention, 50% new year over year in a c- community. And then you have on the extreme end, like you mentioned, somebody who’s been there for eight years or 10 years or whatever, like a lifer.

And then you h- you might have somebody who tries it once, but then there’s this, like, fat middle of people that keep coming back or do a… They treat it like, a master’s degree. “I’m gonna give this community two years of my life,” and, you get some repeats. And then those people who return to the event make your job easier ’cause they’re like, “Oh yeah, Josh is gonna do this.

Then we’re gonna go here. Oh, bathroom’s over here. Breakout things. This is how the mastermind’s gonna work.” And it’s m- it just becomes a organic group of people that are actually helping lead your event. 

Josh Hall: Yeah, it is. Even the second year I’m s- I’m… It’s so fun, and I’m so curious about year to year what it’s gonna evolve to be, just because- Yeah, like I don’t really wanna make too many changes honestly.

In fact, one of our members when we were leaving last year, he was like, “Same time, same place, same everything next year?” And I was like, “Everyone else sound good?” Everyone was like, “Hell yeah.” We wanna just ke- we just wanna do that more. But at the same time I don’t want it to be like the same old thing every time.

So my, my big goal though and the cool thing about an in-person event as is like it’s the connections you make and the conversations you have that you just have no idea were gonna happen that- Yeah … that are the, like the, the really cool thing. You can program as much as you want, but I have learned to basically I wanna leave room for connection and leave room for spontaneous.

So that’s why like our official event is social Friday night, workshop on Saturday, private dinner. Anything around that is free game. I’ll let you know where I’ll be downtown, what restaurants or bars we’ll be at. But we had member, like we had some members this year go candle making together- Okay … on Friday during the day.

That wasn’t planned. It was just like six or seven members were like, “Hey, you guys wanna do that?” And they found it and did it. I think it’s important when it comes to structuring event to, to not have it overly structured. Otherwise, there’s no room for, I don’t wanna say no room for fun, but there’s no room for like spontaneity or genuine, something fresh and new, which is kinda hard to come by for a lot of business owners. We’re used to doing the same stuff over and over, the same call schedule or the same thing. So it’s really, it’s life-giving in so many ways to get in person and have experiences that still think about months and years later in many cases.

Chris Badgett: My next thing I wanted to highlight that you mentioned is people have the experience of meeting their friends. Like- … either their online friends and going three-dimensional or just a new person they’ve never even heard of before. For a really good event, I almost feel guilty when I’m going.

Around my family, I’m like, “Yeah, I’m going to a business conference.” And I know it- I’m packing my swimming suit. I’m looking at the things in the area. “Oh, maybe I’ll find some people who like to run. We’ll go for a run over here.” It’s a learning thing. It’s a business thing.

But a really well-done event, it’s kind of a party, however you wanna define that. Yeah. It’s… But with business benefit, too. 

Josh Hall: One of our- 

Chris Badgett: Go ahead.

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Josh Hall: Oh, dude. One of our members said, “I had no idea.” And she came from a lot of corporate work. She’s like, “I had no idea that a business conference could be fun.”

And it i- obviously, the… With ProCon specifically, it would’ve been hard to not be fun, just ’cause most of us know each other, in a lot of cases very well. Not all the time. We had a lot of members who didn’t know anyone. And there, there are people I found out who are complete ghosts in the community but are still paying.

And I’m like, “I can’t believe they’re still paying for this. They have not logged in, or they’re not…” But they come to the in-person stuff. 

Chris Badgett: Oh, 

Josh Hall: yeah. And it means so much to so many people. So yeah I just… Really the only quote-unquote, work was just the live trainings. But even those we tried to make lighthearted and as fun as possible.

And one thing I did learn with keeping the fun of it is if you are in we’re working, we’re thinking, we’re strategy it doesn’t mean that those things can’t have a light element and some fun. Case in point, for our sponsors this year, we had three sponsors that were there in person. Hans from Termageddon, Sam, one of our members who has his own SEO academy, and 17hats, which is the platform that I use for invoicing and contracting.

Their guy, Jeb, who has been in both events and is now basically a web designer pro, he was there. And Jeb has a huge beard. Ma- Yeah … civil War style beard. And so for this, we did a live sponsor panel this year, and it was so much fun. The questions, it was so much more fun than I could’ve ever imagined.

The questions that people were hitting them with, it was just so great. Who knew that a sponsor session could be fun? But we really… I tried hard to have lighthearted questions. And I was like, “How would you explain Termageddon to a five-year-old?” Yeah. And Hans, on the fly, had to think about how he would do that.

But then I also got their baby pictures, and we did a guess this baby sponsor. And Jebs had a massive beard on his baby picture. Like, when we did that live, it got a huge appl- it was a huge for us. We did a lot of those things to try to make the whole event just nonstop fun.

And then, yeah. There, to me There’s nothing better, and this is just my personal thing, there’s nothing better than being at a pack- not, maybe not a fully packed, but a busy bar that’s like a hole in the wall place downtown in Columbus talking about how we build a six or multi six figure business.

Yeah. That to me is like my happy place if I’m doing… And that’s what happened. One of our members, Mike, we were there till like midnight, and we were just talk- It was, usually at midnight at a bar things are getting sloppy or questionable or, you got some questionable folks coming in, but we were just having a blast and it was as wholesome as you could possibly be at midnight at a bar, and I just loved it.

You know- Yeah … we, on that note real quick, we did, I did try to say we are gonna go to bars,” largely because with a group of 30 to 40 people who may or may not meet randomly, we can’t go to a coffee shop and maybe have 30 people there. We need to have a place that literally has space to grow if people are gonna come.

So we are gonna hang out at a lot of bars, but I made really clear that there is no pressure to drink whatsoever. For folks who don’t drink, it is no problem at all. There will be no pressure. There’s no judgment. We, there’s a lot of us who will be drinking, but it’s not gonna get out of control.

We’re gonna have fun, but there’s no pressure to be around that. So I try to make that really clear for folks who don’t feel comfortable in the bar scene. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah, that is good. And now I can tell just from your website and like I was on your community page, and it said, Something about safe space or whatever.

Yeah. But that’s part of what you do as a community builder, is you create the container and you want everybody to feel comfortable. And I just wanna mention, Josh and I haven’t met in person, and we’re podcasters, so it may not be obvious, but I am a card-carrying extreme introvert. But so I didn’t think events were for me, but when I started going, particularly to the smaller ones, like 20 to 30.

I think to, in my view 30 is the sweet spot. Yeah. But there’s some great 200-person events and stuff, and I go to the giant multi-thousand conferences too, but it’s different. Like, when you go to that 30-person thing where everybody holds the value of, in your case freedom at the top, it’s just gonna be so much fun.

Josh Hall: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: And the the other thing I just wanna mention is it’s not just about your brand or you or whatever. I’ve seen business partnerships, I’ve seen couples and marriages. Oh. Like- 

Josh Hall: Yeah … 

Chris Badgett: I forget the statistic, and this is changing with the generations, but it’s something like one out of four people meet their spouse at work, or that’s what it used to be.

But if you’re a web designer working in your home office or the coffee shop- 

Josh Hall: Yeah … 

Chris Badgett: you may only have a couple events like this a year, but that’s at work for you, and you may actually meet the love of your life, your new best friend, a business partner, a mastermind group, and that’s just part of the value you’re creating.

And- Yeah … and it’s cool. Yeah. I’m sure you have a story of hey, these two people connected in this way, and now they refer business to each other or 

Josh Hall: whatever. Oh, left and right. Yeah. Laur- lot from the in-person events that we’ve done so far. Yeah, we actually … I don’t think we’ve had any couples form, no relationships that I know of, but we did have Sam, who I mentioned, who was one of our sponsors, he has an SEO agency, web design agency, and a a little brother community for Web Designer Pro, which is one of our partners, called Local SEO Academy.

He’d actually be a great fit for your show if you want a introduction- Yeah … to him, Chris. I’m … He probably would love to chat with you. But so he has a little brother community to ours, and he really needed help with the operations of his SEO business. And at the first ProCon, we have another member, Eleanor, who’s pretty quiet.

She’s very introverted. I had no idea that she was, like, a master operator. Okay. And she struggles with doing the marketing and going to the events, and she’s also a stay-at-home mom and only has a certain amount of hours to work. Who knew it? They go, we do ProCon the first year.

Three months later, she’s on his team page, and she is now full-time in his agency, and they have destroyed together in the best way. Yeah. And it’s just, yeah, I would have never known that. I’ve been able to matchmake in some ways and foster a lot of connections in Pro virtually.

But yeah, I l- I’m there in person, and I’m looking around and seeing everyone chatting, and I’m always wondering “I wonder what that conversation is, or what that conversation is.” You just never know where something’s gonna lead, which is just so cool. Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. This is like a master class in community building, and you’re such a natural at it.

It’s, And I know, I’m sure you had your bumps and hiccups in figuring it all out, but it’s so valuable. And again, it’s the least misunderstood. ‘Cause we think about courses, we got content, maybe quizzes, certificates, things like that. Coaching, you come with your problems, I’m gonna help you.

But community, like this stuff we’re talking about, is more amorphous and squishy and hard to define, like what it is we’re actually doing online or in person or on a Zoom call. Yeah. But it’s all a community. 

Josh Hall: And I would say for the introversion thing, like the introvert thing like you said, I totally agree.

Now, I am much more extroverted. However, I’ve been in plenty and I did networking for almost a decade. I remember feeling very nervous to speak- Yeah … and being very nervous to go to a 200-person event. I’m like, “I maybe all know a couple people and I’m gonna cling to them.” Despite being fairly extroverted I’m certainly not someone who’s gonna go with people, a group of people I don’t know or feel comfortable with, and be like, “Hey, I’m Joss, this is this.”

So when you go to a place where even if it’s 30, 40, 50 people, but like you said, they are you, they are your people, it is so much easier. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. 

Josh Hall: And there’s just a natural, like you can just be yourself. If you’re introverted- You let the mask 

Chris Badgett: down. The mask comes down … 

Josh Hall: yeah. That’s where like you can talk nerdy, and you can talk about DNS struggles and, robots.txt file issues with people who understand you, versus going to the networking group that’s, chiropractors and real estate agents and whatever, which I still recommend.

But it is, it’s like you can… Yeah, you can let your guard down. You can be yourself. And then it’s funny, one of, one of our m- one of the most introverted people at this last round, Veronica, super quiet, super timid, was real… Like I couldn’t believe she came in person. Like good for her for getting out of her comfort zone.

Night two, she is singing karaoke. Someone who didn’t, like barely say two sentences the whole couple days before that, was so comfortable by the end that she was doing karaoke. And yeah, it was just so cool. So cool,

Chris Badgett: the other thing I just wanna mention here is a nuance, and it really makes sense for web designers.

Sometimes we go to events to get clients, to get new business. Which puts a kind of pressure on you. 

Josh Hall: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: But you’re not going here to sell or, be professional. You’re being professional, but you’re not… You’re, it’s very different just hanging out with your peers- Yeah … and learning as a learning community, which is really cool.

Josh Hall: That is it. And that’s what’s cool is like you don’t go into it thinking like, “I’m gonna make a business partner,” or- No … “I’m gonna, make a referral partner.” No, it’s like- some, depending on how active people in Pro are, they’re gonna go there and they’re already gonna know people and they’re gonna have a rapport.

And, there’s naturally gonna be a few groups of people who already are working together, so they’re gonna talk a lot. But if you go there with the intention of, yeah there’s even… There’s no pressure to serve or sell. There’s no pressure for anything. You just go to- Yeah

learn and connect and hang, and that’s where you never know where things are gonna lead. Actually, one of our members, Dylan, who is very introverted, super struggles to get out to get clients, the majority of his revenue this year has come from white labeling with other Pro members, and the majority of those opportunities came from ProCon.

So it took- Yeah … him being in person with a bunch of people and having conversations where they were like, “Oh, shoot yeah, I can use you,” and, have you, “Have you help me with this?” And he’s really he’s trending upwards with having that opportunity after meeting people in person as an extreme introvert, and he would be the first to say he is.

Yeah, it’s, yeah, so cool. So you gotta give- I think- Events need… You gotta give the people the space, though. That’s certainly, that’s the goal 

Chris Badgett: Well, tell us about your new program. 

Josh Hall: So the, the newer thing that I actually launched at the end of this ProCon event was our mastermind. Our Web Designer Pro specific mastermind.

It’s our highest tier offer. It is for the folks who, like I mentioned earlier, especially for the scalers who are scaling at a six and multi-six figure level. They may have a studio or a small team. And then the question becomes are they too advanced for Pro? And that’s really… I can only go to a certain level with my experience and my comfort with coaching.

But at the same time, I … There, there was a glaring need for folks who get to that point. They want more Josh, they want more one-on-one coaching calls, and they want a private space with other Pro members that is not gonna actually be heard by other Pro members. 

So the way we do our coaching calls right now is those coaching calls get repurposed for our pri-

We have a private Pro podcast app, or like a Pro podcast feed. So everyone who has a Pro member profile is gonna hear the coaching calls. Confidential stuff is not gonna be ideal in that scenario. So this is the opportunity for folks to, yeah, have that confidential private group that’s really intensive, and it’s our most intensive coaching offer.

So I technically have four tiers now. There’s courses. The new price point for the courses, I’m actually about to move to a quarterly pricing. I’m not sure when this is gonna come out. At the time of recording this, it sits monthly at 49, but I’ve realized I really want people to commit at least three months, at least in the, even in the courses, just to better serve them and really encourage them to go as far and as fast as they can, and then up- upgrade to community when they’re ready.

So that’s one change we’re gonna make on the courses side. The community currently is 99 a month. And then the coaching tier, which gives folks DM access for coaching to me, and a one annual, like, one-on-one private call now just moved to 3,000 a year. That’s the current price points, and then the mastermind is a $10,000 a year deal because that’s private group, bi-weekly call, or calls every two weeks with just our private group, and it gives people a quarterly one-on-one with me for the most intensive coaching.

And we’re really drilling into numbers, team, profit, delegation, leadership, all those things. So it’s been cool to kinda… to grow and flex the coaching muscle at that level ’cause I’ve learned a lot from those folks. And I found in myself a level of high coaching that I didn’t really know that I had.

But it took a lot of people telling me “Josh, how the hell do you not have a 10K or 20K program?” And yeah, I just was finally like, “Screw it, I’m gonna do it.” And we’re kinda building it together in a lot of ways, but it’s a group of five, five pro members who joined the first round, so there’s six of us all together- together, and it’s been freaking awesome.

We’re like four months into it now. 

Chris Badgett: I think web designers specifically suffer from this issue where we’re so close to our strengths, we don’t see it. I know that you’re an incredible coach. I’ve watched you invest in being coached yourself- … with i- in your own development, which you learn a lot from working with a high-quality coach as well.

And you’ve been communicating for decade plus like you investing- Absolutely … and figuring out this whole thing. It’s a no… It’s not a surprise to me. But I’m just highlighting that- Yeah … it’s such a thing with online education or courses, coaching, and community, when you’re so close to your strengths, you have a massive blind spot.

Josh Hall: I als- I’ll- And tell me this, Chris, do you feel like in any sort of coaching capacity… It feels weird because I feel like I’ve, I’m ripping off my coaches ’cause I’m using their lines sometimes. 

Chris Badgett: And- No, it’s, I’ve heard it called R&D. So that’s rob and duplicate, which sounds bad. But- That’s true … this is what we do.

Yeah. Like, when you write a book, “Oh, yeah, this person said this. I’m gonna marry that idea with this idea,” it’s just part of… That’s what we do. It’s when you go to school, you borrow ideas- Yeah … and you build on them, and you move them forward, and sometimes you quote. And if you remember that you can give credit where credit is due.

Like I don’t remember who said finding the others. But if I could remember who that was, I would’ve probably mentioned like, “Oh, there’s this great quote- Yeah … by this person.” 

Josh Hall: Abraham Lincoln. Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Okay. 

Josh Hall: Yeah. All quotes lead back to Abe. Yep. 

Chris Badgett: Probably. 

Josh Hall: Probably … but I think about often, yeah, the reason I mention that is es- especially at this level of coaching, ’cause if there’s if there’s coaching that I’m doing from a capacity of helping people out with their pricing and their offers and building recurring revenue and client generation and referrals, I largely base that off of my experience.

Although now I’m in a really unique position to where I am like, this sounds super douchey, but I’m like 100x more powerful as a coach now because not only do I have my experience, but I have the experience of my CEO, Eric, who bought my agency, and I’m a consultant for them, and hundreds of pro members who I’ve coached.

So I can literally be like, “Ooh you would learn a lot from this model that this guy did. I’d recommend doing this from what I learned, but I also see this working over here.” And then suddenly they just save maybe two years of hardship by one little DM conversation. So that’s a… That feels different than sometimes at this high level coaching.

I do often think about- more intensive coaching learning that I’ve had that I do replicate. I think about James Schramko- Yeah … who we know. Yeah. And I coached with him for four, four or five years. And I remember it was actually on my… Actually, funny enough, this was on my podcast that he challenged me with this idea, but I asked him about the people who have trouble scaling and delegating, and he said, “Do you ever, have they ever eaten at a restaurant?”

And I was like, “Yeah, probably.” He’s like, “Then they can scale, delegate and scale. They did it at the restaurant. They paid someone to cook the food and, they ordered it.” And I was like, “Oh, I never thought about it like that.” So sometimes it’s those little easy analogies that, yeah, that, can go a long way and can be replicated.

So I’m leaning into it now. I’m leaning… Like every line I’ve ever read or heard- Yeah … I’m like absolutely using, but. 

Chris Badgett: And I’ll give credit, R&D, Robin Duplicate, is a Dan Martell-ism, who I- Oh, okay … coached under for a while. And then there’s another old one that hopefully helps you out there listening or watching, which Josh mentioned, is as a subject matter expert, this is Brendon Burchard from old school internet marketing time, but he was talking about how you don’t always have to be the role model.

You can be the researcher. And I know you’re really good at research. You’ve watched the people, like you’re watching in your community or watching in the industry, but we all get hung up in that we have to be like… It’s our, it’s, I don’t know if it’s our ego or what it is, but it’s like you can be a great coach.

You don’t have to be Tony Robbins to help somebody with personal development, 

Josh Hall: and I really, I thought about this when I… This was a big challenge for me when I thought about selling my agency because I knew I wanted to online educate full-time and just go for it. I just, I can only run r- run one business at a time.

I was like, in my mind, I’m like if I’m not building websites, how am I gonna teach people to build a website business?” Now yes, I had a decade of experience, but what I’ve realized in that time is I’m actually way more, again, e- l- I guess I’m way more qualified and even a better fit for so many people at different levels because I have my experience and like I just said, the experience of all these other hundreds of people, and I can spot gaps faster than I’d say just about anybody as a web design business coach, which is like- Yeah

my official role i- in Pro. And one thing I’ve learned too is we were just talking about this recently. Actually, a few coaching members I’ve talked to about transparently, how is my coaching still helping you at this level? And one thing I’ve realized is if you look at any professional athlete, everybody at the top has a coach, and none of those coaches can do what the athlete does.

Chris Badgett: Yes. 

Josh Hall: But what is the… like this is probably I’m preaching to the choir here, but like the coach spots stuff that the athlete doesn’t see. The coach is watching. The coach is getting like honest feedback that they’re not gonna share with anyone else, and the coach is able to give like really targeted advice that can go such a long way based off of just maybe one little conversation or one call.

Yeah. I’ve definitely learned that and felt even more … i’ve rarely had any, like, imposter syndrome feelings as a coach, but I have had the subtle seasons of doubt of “Man, I haven’t built a website for a client in eight years. Who am I to teach these people?” I’m like h- yeah, who am I?”

I run the web- number one web design podcast in the world. Pro, I’m teaching people. I’ve literally helped people build six and multi six figure businesses. Some of them have made literally several million dollars in lifetime revenue since coaching with me. So I’m more than qualified to be a voice of reason and a guide, even though I’m not doing that work right now 

Chris Badgett: 100%.

And I know we’re a little bit over. I just wanted to get one more question while- 

Josh Hall: Oh, sure … 

Chris Badgett: while I had Josh Hall on, on- 

Josh Hall: Real quick, Chris, while you’re asking the question, I’m just gonna close this door. Our kids just- Yeah … came in before one of ’em busted. I’m just gonna close my door real quick. Yeah. I’m listening.

No problem. 

Chris Badgett: Okay. The, the question is that there’s a lot of fear in the web designer, web design agency space right now. Some people, it’s like some people are struggling, business is drying up. It’s harder to get clients. And the other side, there’s people that are killing it as agency.

We’ve got AI on the scene creating a lot of just noise, distraction, but also useful tools and maybe just lightning round style, like what’s two to five things that the, the web designers that are doing great these days are doing either differently or continuing to do what’s always worked?

What sets them apart from the ones that are struggling these days? 

Josh Hall: The … Here’s the good news. The stuff that worked a decade ago is what’s working today in 2026 even better in many ways. I really do think that … A- and I do agree. I’ve absolutely seen this with Pro too, where people are either struggling mightily or absolutely crushing it, and there are some differences.

Some of the differences are the people who are crushing it may have already established business, and they’ve already got clients, and they’re just building off of that and doubling down on that or adding more high level services. But at the same time, there are people who are new who are crushing it too.

I think one of the, the dangers, one of the, the two to five things is this idea of AI and this, and all the different things you can do. Distraction is- Yeah … destroying people. It is- Yeah … destroying … I th- I think about how many people, and I know at some capacity you gotta have time to learn and experiment and play around, particularly with AI or any other platform.

But at the same time, I’m wondering when I hear some people say I can’t find any clients,” but they’re tinkering around with all these different platforms, and they don’t really have a clear offer, and they’re just doing busy work basically. They haven’t joined a networking group. They haven’t done anything to sell.

They haven’t reached out to their personal and professional network. I’m like, if you didn’t, if you didn’t distract yourself with all this stuff and you actually did the stuff that is gonna get you in front of people, I guarantee you wouldn’t be in this position. And if we work on your offer and your pricing, that’s it.

Leads, offer, pricing. There’s, there it is. There’s the three things: leads, offer, pricing. Those are like, it’s the basics of business. And I really think that whether it’s being on social media, whether it’s tinkering out with AI, I think you really do have to master traction. ‘Cause the word distraction is, means it’s just, it’s pulling you away from something else.

You need, I think now more than ever, to be like, you gotta have a vision, you have to have a goal where you wanna get, and this is vague, but you really need to just put the blinders on and do less social media, do less tinker around with AI. And depending on where people are at, I know, there’s a time and place for all that, but that’s kinda what I’ve seen, honestly, man.

If I could boil it down to anything, the people who are killing it, they are just doubling down on what is working, which luckily is 3 to 6,000… for websites, for web designers, 3 to $6,000 websites, $99 hosting and maintenance plans with a fallback plan of 59 bucks or 49 bucks ideally, and then usually some sort of growth service for clients who want more than just a website and hosting.

That may be SEO, that may be strategy, it may be content, it may be social media, it may be branding, it may be design. And any amount of services in that framework, in my course, my business course, which is Inside Pro, I have a framework that’s build, support, grow, and there it is, friends. You don’t even need to pay for the course to implement that.

Obviously there’s a lot more to it, but that’s what’s working, those things right there. First, first six and multi six figure businesses, and then you get to a point where you start to scale a little bit, start to get some help, and that’s when the freedom really takes off 

Chris Badgett: That is awesome.

So you out there listening or watching, go check out webdesignerpro.com. Check out Josh’s podcast, the Web Design Business podcast. Did I say that correctly? 

Josh Hall: Yeah, Web Design Business. Yep. 

Chris Badgett: Yep. And put him in your corner. This is it’s Josh, but it’s also a community. And yeah, I just… I can’t say enough great things about you, and, I wish I had…

I wish you existed when I started building websites for clients in 2010. 

Josh Hall: Yeah. ‘

Chris Badgett: Cause I was just shooting in the dark. And then once you surround yourself with good coaching and courses and community it’s a 10X change- 

Josh Hall: Yeah … 

Chris Badgett: at least. 

Josh Hall: Oh, for sure. Yeah, you go so much further faster when you have, yeah, courses, community coaching.

That’s the biggie. It’s like an athlete sticking with the athlete analogy, but, successful athletes have cheerleaders cheering them on. They have teammates who are right there with them, and then they have a coach who’s challenging them and getting them to that next level, and that’s the, a visual that I have for pro members is you need cheerleaders, you need teammates, and you need a coach.

By the way, I should mention too, I have a brand-new email list that I’ve just opened up that is specific to community builders. Oh. It’s completely free. Joshhall.co/community will get you there. And yeah, that is specific for community builders. I’m gonna start, I’m dipping my toe into sharing a little more about community building and, as I mentioned earlier, eventually here I’m gonna have an offer to coach at a higher level to start for community folks.

But eventually I could foresee, not a full Web Designer Pro brand, but some… I just love talk- obviously I love talking about community, so I wanna help more folks in that realm where I can with the time that I have available. So yeah, that’s free. Totally free to sign up for, joshhall.co/community if you wanna check it out.

Chris Badgett: Josh, thank you so much for coming. I can’t wait to catch up a year from now and see what you’ve done, see where you’re at. 

Josh Hall: Hopefully I’ll see you in, hopefully I’ll see you in about six months at ProCon 2027. 

Chris Badgett: Nice. That’s 

Josh Hall: just seven months if you wanna… We can talk about that. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

LifterLMS would like to sponsor. We could- Dude … we could look at that. 

Josh Hall: Freaking heck yeah, man. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Thanks for coming on. I really appreciate it, and we’re definitely gonna have to do it again sometime. 

Josh Hall: All right, Chris. Thanks, man.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMScast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at lifterlms.com/gift. Go to lifterlms.com/gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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Chris Badgett discusses his own experience running WordPress for almost 20 years and how LifterLMS’s hosting requirements changed as the business expanded. He starts out by talking about his early experiences learning WordPress and creating websites for customers using Bluehost and GoDaddy. He then talks about how LifterLMS grew into a bigger and more complicated company by going through Media Temple, Amazon Web Services, WP Engine, Pagely, and finally Rocket.net.

According to Chris, an online education company’s hosting needs increase along with its traffic, customers, WooCommerce transactions, LMS activity, subscriptions, and dynamic material, all of which put increasing demands on the website. He highlights that selecting a host is more than just picking the quickest server or the cheapest package; for companies that rely on their websites, dependable infrastructure, scalability, security, and particularly excellent human assistance are essential.

His encounters with hosting issues also inspired LifterLMS to provide a specialized hosting solution for LMS developers, assisting them in avoiding the typical issues brought on by inadequate or improperly configured hosting. Additionally, Chris shows why specialist hosting may be beneficial for firms operating complicated LMS and e-commerce websites and identifies a number of hosting companies that LifterLMS users have had great experiences with.

He talks about LifterLMS’s all-in-one strategy, dedication to customer service, and ongoing ties to the larger WordPress ecosystem. In the end, Chris’s message is that outgrowing your web host may indicate that your company is doing well, and that an online education company may enhance performance, conversions, dependability, and scalability with the correct hosting environment.

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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.

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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. My name is Chris Badgett, and in this episode, we’re gonna go deep into WordPress hosting, my personal journey, my company journey at LifterLMS. And the goal of this episode is to share our story and share how we think about hosting, because it ends up being, like, a big issue when you’re building an online business, an online presence, an online education company So first off, I just wanna say no matter where you are with hosting, or maybe you don’t even have web hosting yet, not all hosts fit for the scale that you’re at.

So it’s important to kinda realize what you’re buying, what’s included, and I’m not just gonna talk in generalities here. I’m gonna get into a lot of specifics about WordPress hosting. So what was my very first w- web host? So this was probably around 2008. I was teaching myself WordPress by watching videos on YouTube, and I probably went with whatever I saw in those early YouTube tutorial videos, and I ended up on Bluehost.

So back in the day, like before 2010 there were affiliates that made a lot of money recommending different web hosts, and they would teach things like how to build a WordPress website from scratch, and then you need to click on their link and get a discount on your hosting or whatever. So that was like the heyday of affiliate income from hosting.

I’m sure there’s still affiliates that make good money from hosting, but back then, the recommendation that I received was to go to Bluehost. And the cool thing about Bluehost, just like GoDaddy, is I could buy a domain name and I could get started with WordPress right away. At that time it was harder.

There was something called, I believe, Softaculous that would help you install WordPress on the host. This is before the managed WordPress hosting companies that we know and love today. But that was my f- very first hosting experience with Bluehost, and honestly, I was just completely blown away that I could create a message or create a webpage and put it online without being a developer, and that’s where- when I really fell in love with WordPress back around that 2008 period.

I still have that Bluehost account today. Most of my domain names are actually over there, and That’s where I got started. Bluehost is a great starter host. There’s good people that work at that company. So back then it was like Bluehost and GoDaddy were the main players in town, at least for people getting into WordPress.

So that’s how I got started. I did a lot with Bluehost. If I got a client when I was a solo freelancer, I would recommend Bluehost and get them set up there. A lot of people had already bought a domain name on GoDaddy, and GoDaddy had great marketing. They probably have the best domain name buying experience.

And, I ended up working with GoDaddy a lot with my clients, and GoDaddy had like a cheaper price point that people could really get in and build their first website where they j- just needed a domain name and some hosting that would get the job done. So that’s kind of the origin. If you talk to anybody who’s been around for a while there’s…

you’ll hear those names, Bluehost and GoDaddy, come up a lot. They’re good companies. There’s g- they’re good people that work there. And I’m gonna talk a little bit more about GoDaddy later. In my personal journey, by the way, later, I ended up getting hosting at WP Engine, just for my personal sites, not my company sites.

And the thing I loved about WP Engine was how easy it was to just get started with WordPress. Their staging site features for testing and running updates and stuff was really good. Jason Cohen, the entrepreneur behind who founded the WP Engine, is a super smart dude, by the way. He just released a book.

I’m blanking on the title right now, but I would definitely check it out. Jason Cohen is a really smart, savvy, helpful entrepreneur, so go check that out but then getting into my agency years. So I used to have an agency called Badgett Media. That’s how I started, making money with client projects.

And I would build sites for people, so a lot of those went on Bluehost and GoDaddy. And then– or the client already had some hosting and, I would just work with whatever they had, which is super interesting because the, the– I’ve spent, so much time in this space, almost two decades.

You think you know all the web hosts that are out there, particularly in the early days, but there’s actually so many. It’s not like there was just GoDaddy or Bluehost. There’s so many and, different parts of the world and different things. The hosting industry is super complex. Some are super focused on WordPress, some are not focused on WordPress at all.

Some will just host anything. So there’s just such a huge variety. It can be really overwhelming and hard to choose, particularly if you’re not that educated in hosting. And, my challenge, whi-which I know a lot of people have, is you start looking at these hosting websites and their pricing pages, and they start talking about CPUs, RAM, PHP workers, and things like that, and you’re just like, “I don’t know.

I just want a web host that’s fast, has good support, and is gonna have my back if I ever need some kind of help or something like that.” But as my agency evolved, I merged my agency with another agency called Codebox, and that was the beginning of me as an agency moving into some bigger, more complex projects.

Codebox is the parent company that I own. LifterLMS is actually a brand under Codebox. LifterLMS is also our sole focus. That’s what we do under the Codebox brand. But when we operated Codebox as an agency, at that time, we started doing all of our web hosting on a company called Media Temple. So this is around 2012, 2013 era, 2014.

And Media T- Temple was like an up-and-coming just awesome web host that we used at the time. Eventually, Media Temple was acquired by GoDaddy, and and then that evolved from there, which I’ll talk about in a little bit. But when LifterLMS first started, if you don’t know I’m a really customer-centric entrepreneur.

I don’t put my business or desire for profit or making money at the center of my business. I actually put my customer at the center of my business at LifterLMS. That’s the s- literally the secret to success is maniacal, obsessive, consistent focus on your customer, not your needs as a business. So anyways, in the early days of LifterLMS, when we first launched it in October of 2014, I believe it was we didn’t even use WordPress to launch the product.

We used a landing page service called Leadpages. There was an entrepreneur behind that named Clay Collins. It was really cool and innovative at the time, but all we had for the first launch of LifterLMS was a couple of landing pages, like a homepage and a pricing page and some Buy Now buttons. And then we actually facilitated, on our launch of LifterLMS, I think we had a separate WooCommerce website on Media Temple that would, process the transaction using WooCommerce and then we developed our own licensing system that we still use today to manage the software licenses and using WooCommerce subscriptions and so on.

But anyways, the whole marketing site of the first LifterLMS web presence was literally a Leadpages template that I just went in and modified, the text and the images and built the pricing table and so on. So th- our first marketing site wasn’t even hosted by WordPress, it was hope- hosted by a Leadpages SaaS or software as a service solution.

Clay Collins sold Leadpages. I forget exactly how it went, but I think there’s a company in- based out of Mexico that owns Leadpages today. It’s still alive and well. But anyways, from there we then just pushed everything together onto our WordPress site on Media Temple And, had our WooCommerce store and WooSubscriptions for the software licenses, and started building pages directly inside WordPress.

We launched our blog, we launched the podcast, and just started managing all that from our WordPress website on Media Temple and various subdomains. When we started, we had the podcast and the blog on subdomains just so it didn’t get too complicated with, WordPress and WooCommerce, WordPress and podcast software, and then WordPress and all the stuff going on with the blogging system.

Since then, by the way, we’ve consolidated many of those sites into one. We still use subdomains for different things, like the podcast is still on a subdomain. We run our academy powered by LifterLMS on a subdomain as well. But anyways, so we’re evolving. We outgrew what Media Temple was capable of.

So then we spent about a year running our own servers. So we took matters into our own hands. We got a Amazon Web Services, box. But, this thing happens when you’re running technology is like it’s hard enough to run the website, but now you’re also gonna be responsible for the servers.

We went on to Upwork or oDesk or one of those platforms and found a systems administrator to free up our time for development on the software itself, not our hosting infrastructure. And we tried Amazon Web Services for a while, AWS as it’s known. It was good, but there was a lot of black boxes in terms of working with our sys admin.

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We weren’t really learning anything. We had a single point of failure in terms of if our sys admin’s not there and our development team is really focused on building software for WordPress, not hosting infrastructure, it was just too much. So then we started shopping around for another host.

We decided to go with WP Engine for the lifterlms.com website and all of our subdomain. We stayed with WP Engine for a long time, and it was great. Like I said, the way they do staging sites and, you know, some of the innovation that went into just making WordPress easier to work with at the hosting layer, while also having quality support, our time with WP Engine was great At the time, WP Engine was really innovating.

They even started doing some hosted solutions. So they had a LifterLMS hosted solution for course creators who sign up for WP Engine, and they could click a button and have an LMS ready to go. That was cool. WP Engine ended up discontinuing that, unfortunately, and we started having problems with WP Engine in terms of sometimes, like the images on our site would start disappearing for no reason, and we couldn’t figure it out.

It’s something called a CDN or a content delivery network. Was just having problems and we would work with it, then it would get resolved, then the problem would come back, and so on. So we started looking around again for another web host At that time we decided to go with Pagely.

So after talking to Matt Medeiros, who’s known in the WordPress community, he worked in sales at Pagely. He’s also a friend. He’s also a LifterLMS course creator. And we had gone to the Pagely conference called Pressnomics at least one or a couple times at that point. And, we switched, we made the move to Pagely, which was awesome.

We ended up staying approximately eight years with Pagely. About halfway through that journey, Pagely was actually acquired by GoDaddy, and we decided just to stay. A lot of the team was there, the service continued, the tech support tickets got answered quickly, and so on. And then the, the– whether it was the weekend or a weird time, no matter what, like, when you send a support ticket to Pagely, they’re on it.

They’re on it quickly. They have a lot of great services in terms of just, protecting you from a security standpoint and that kind of thing, and it was great. We had a really great run with Pagely. Towards the end of our time with Pagely, which as of this recording was somewhat recently in the past several months, we noticed we’d like our website to be a little faster, not just on the front end, but when we’re doing things in the back end of WordPress and so on, on the a- admin pages.

So we started shopping around and looking around again and ultimately we looked at a lot of different things, and we decided to go with Rocket.net. So again, hosting is, for us, not just a commodity. It’s an important part of our infrastructure. LifterLMS throughout this time is growing. We’re getting more traffic, more demand.

Our websites are getting heavier. We have more customers, more users, more people filling out forms, signing up for things. We’re powering our own LifterLMS academy, which has tons and tons of people on it every day. The dynamic content that our websites are serving, whether it’s a WooCommerce store or it’s a learning management system powered by LifterLMS, it’s just getting heavier and heavier, and we needed a more performant hosting experience So we signed up with Rocket, not right away.

We started doing some tests and and then we– Their, rocket.net recommended some simulated traffic tools and things that we could really put it through the wringer, was a copy of our site with simulated traffic. And what we found is it was at least twice as fast as what we were on before, which we were happy with.

Of course, you never know until your live website is on there. But we did that. The Cloudflare enterprise tier that’s included with their package was working well. So we decided to stay with that, and we’ve been on rocket.net for a while. So it was just– And it was going good. It was like, oh my gosh, this is a lot faster.

Everybody on the team could see it. In web hosting, the amount of time it takes for a page to load can have a dramatic impact on your conversion rate. So you want things like your homepage, your pricing page, your checkout experience to be super fast, and we noticed that with rocket.net And again, we’re human beings duct taping the internet together to make our online businesses work.

And I had met some of the Rocket.net team like Ben Ga- Ga- Gabler, I believe his last name is, the founder. Chad, who was on his team, we’d met at many WordPress events, and I just had a good feeling about the company. The thing I like the most about Rocket, besides the huge speed increase, is the support.

Now, we had really good support at Pagely, and I liked it. It was awesome. They’re always good. They always– You know, you had that feeling when you’re talking to ’em that they know where you’re at in terms of experience. So like developers got involved immediately in tickets and things like that at Pagely, which was awesome.

At Rocket, they took it to the next level. They basically understand their customer. Remember I was talking about a customer-centric business, and one of the things all of us WordPress companies use is Slack, the instant messaging and team communication tool. So Rocket immediately invited us to a shared Slack channel, and I watched our lead developer, Brian Hogg running tests and working through migration issues, setup issues, configuration issues, and the Rocket.net team, again, not just one person, that was the lesson from Amazon Web Services and having a cis admin, was on it.

They’re– were working things out with the migration, optimizing configurations, running tests, getting us where we wanna be in terms of automated updates for some things, but not other things, for some sites, not other sites, and all of that. And it’s just a super smooth experience ’cause we’re not just buying hosting infrastructure and, paying for speed at scale.

We want high quality human support that’s really good. And we’ve been around the block a bit, so our demands and our expectations, I should say, are high. And Rocket so far has delivered on all of that So that enterprise support in a Slack channel, again, we’re on the Rocket.net Enterprise plan, so that’s where we get those high levels of support and speed and resources and all that.

But it’s been good. It’s not like a ticket queue for support. It’s like a human relationship and a team that’s there ready to roll and has your back. So that’s Rocket.net, where we are today. And I should also mention, we still do s-self-host a lot. We have a lot of properties on DigitalOcean, as an example, which these are custom infrastructure, internal resources for us.

For example, I’ll highlight two things we put on DigitalOcean. One is our sandbox sites. So you may have heard of the famous LifterLMS dollar demo, and what that is anybody can come to LifterLMS.com, click on the demo link. We have different types of demos, but one of those demos is a sandbox demo, which means anybody for a dollar can buy a website for 30 days that has LifterLMS with all of our software installed from our Infinity Bundle plan, which is our, all of our add-ons, core, everything, and it also has demo content.

And we actually have three different demo sites that people can buy. One’s more for an expert business somebody who’s teaching what they know, making money with what they know. The other one is more of a school setup, and then the other one is more for a business internal training setup, where a business is training their employees or franchisees, like an internal LMS.

So anyways, that sandbox environment lives on DigitalOcean. We also use that sandbox environment for testing our own software. When we’re creating marketing content, like many of the videos or tutorials that you’ve seen, our team is using a copy of one of our templated demo sites, and we spin that up in our sandbox for tutorial content.

Or if we have a partner that’s integrating with LifterLMS, and they’re testing their integration, we’ll give them a free sandbox environment where they can test their integration and so on. So that’s like a purpose-built our own just kind of infrastructure, hosting infrastructure on top of DigitalOcean that we use The other thing we have on DigitalOcean is a server instance for our AI agent.

The primary agent is called Maurice. Maurice is named after the St- Steve Miller Band song called “The Joker.” You know where it says — I’m not gonna sing because I’m not a great singer, but there’s a line in there called, “Some people call me Maurice.” Maurice, the space cowboy, that is, our brand character for our AI agent.

Maurice is super powerful. I should do a whole episode about what Maurice does. It’s been a huge unlock for our team. And Maurice is, for example, is available locally in my instance of VS Code. Maurice is available to our team in Slack. Maurice is available in the cloud on DigitalOcean, and so on. We have lots of plans and ideas happening there in terms of leveraging agents who have extreme context to help us all do our work that we do at LifterLMS, and so on.

So I’ll do a, a separate episode about that. This episode is about hosting, but again, our AI agent, that’s not really meant for managed WordPress hosting. That is a purpose-built infrastructure that we do on DigitalOcean So the last piece to mention is the hosting offer that we’re developing at LifterLMS.

So since version one of LifterLMS, our stance has not changed in that we are the most comprehensive all-in-one solution for education entrepreneurs online, while also leveraging the benefits and the ecosystem of WordPress. So what do I mean by all-in-one? So LifterLMS made a splash when it launched in 2014 and combined several things together.

The four primary things it combined together are a learning management system, that’s a given, so that’s things like creating courses, projects, progress tracking, student accounts reporting management tools for managing learners, and grading and things like that. So that’s the LMS piece. But we also added the e-commerce piece.

So from day one, LifterLMS had its own e-commerce system with Stripe, PayPal. We also have an optional integration with WooCommerce. We also integrate with Authorize.net. So that’s the e-commerce piece. Then there’s membership. So a lot of people were patching together membership plugins, e-commerce plugins, LMS plugins to make it work.

From day one, we said none of that. We will integrate with all those other tools, but our user just wants to be able to do what they can do with one tool. So we included memberships, so content protection protecting content outside of courses, bundling courses together, selling access via memberships.

All that has been built inside LifterLMS from day one. And the fourth piece was the engagement piece And by engagement, things like certifications, achievement badges, behavior-based emails that are dynamic, that can be triggered based on behavior in the LMS. All of this engagement stuff we built directly into LifterLMS itself.

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So that’s what I mean by all-in-one. But just to continue on that story that has been going for 12 years, a lot of people ask us “Hey, where should we host our site?” We’re known for our support. See, at LifterLMS, we don’t treat support as a cost center. We treat it as a feature of the product. So you’re gonna get high-quality human support and it’s really good.

And we do things that nobody else does, like live calls with our top users. If you have the Universe bundle or the Infinity bundle or a lifetime license, you can come on live weekly Zoom calls and get help. We call that office hours. We also do live calls and live streams for all our customers, all our free users, and all our prospects that people can attend.

So that is another piece where we go above and beyond and provide exceptional support. But besides that, people constantly ask us for hosting recommendations, and that’s why we put together the LifterLMS recommended resources page, which at the top has the hosting recommendations, which I’ll talk about in a little bit.

But people have been asking us for a long time to do hosting ourselves and deliver that value. And the cool thing about the hosting industry is it has evolved a lot. If you look at companies like Cloudflare, DigitalOcean, all the managed WordPress hosts and the things they do to help agencies and other types of users deliver hosting, it’s really interesting.

It’s never been easier. I think back to the beginning when I’m messing around with Bluehost and Softaculous or whatever it was called, and I was trying to understand this landing page on the WordPress website called the famous five-minute install. We’ve come a long way, and all those things are great, and it’s awesome how technology Continues to evolve and be more user-friendly.

We’re doing so much, like I mentioned, our AI agents LifterLMS MCP already exists, so the AI agents, you can just chat with your website and do things in WordPress, in LifterLMS, and the other plugins you’re using. The LifterLMS MCP is phenomenal. I just am doing testing right now on 100 new endpoints for the API and the MCP for LifterLMS, which we’ll cover in another episode.

Not just across LifterLMS core, but our add-ons so that, LifterLMS is going agentic, which is really interesting and fascinating and fun and scary and exciting all at the same time. But anyways, on the hosting level, we’re put- putting together a hosting package for people who want the same high-quality support, the same kind of speed, and just a phenomenal WordPress hosting experience that just fades into the background.

And if you wanna teach online or do any kind of educational ad- adventure, whether that’s selling courses or memberships for money, or you’re a nonprofit training a community or a team, or you’re a big business and you’re doing internal training Or you’re doing continuing education as a business, we wanna make the hosting piece easy ’cause we see a lot of people struggle.

Unfortunately, a lot of our customer support is actually related to a business being on a hosting that is underpowered for what they need, or that is just not set up for complex sites like e-commerce and learning management systems, which require more resources. So we’re building that. Go to lifterlms.com/hosting.

Fill out the form there. We’ll be in touch with you if you’re interested in getting the same great service, speed, and quality products like you’ve come to know and love from LifterLMS. So go to lifterlms.com/hosting, check it out, fill out the form. And I also just wanna mention, hosting is a strange thing in that there’s probably 1,000 web hosts out there.

Correct me if I’m wrong. It could be more. It could be, like, 10,000. I don’t know. But the thing is you just need the web hosting that’s right for you. I would still recommend my very first host Bluehost. If you’re just getting started go start on Bluehost. They have really affordable plans.

Go start on GoDaddy, and so on. But over time, what we’ve done at LifterLMS, based on our experience and the experience Of our users, ’cause they tell us when they love a host. So if somebody’s happy where they are, we wanna know about it, and we’re gonna recommend that host. So I’m just gonna read off some other web hosts that we love that our users also recommend.

So one of those is TangibleXP, which has specialized LMS hosting, high traffic, and lots of concurrent user systems in place. It’s a super high-quality focused web host. Gabriel and the team at TangibleXP are awesome. Another one is called Levamo. They launched a couple years ago under the name RapidCloud.

These are the founders of BuddyBoss, who pivoted into hosting after they sold BuddyBoss, and they had– they saw the same thing I see. So building an online community with lots of dynamic content. Their users had challenges, and their support queue was full of not necessarily BuddyBoss-related issues, but hosting issues.

So they wanted to solve that in their next act, and they built Levamo for tools like LifterLMS, BuddyBoss, and WooCommerce. So check them out. Another high-quality host is Convesio, which has auto-scaling for high-traffic LMS sites I was talking to a customer once who was, like, in our suppor- support queue.

It got escalated up to me. “Hey, this guy’s not happy, super successful. He’s been around for a while, and he’s just having trouble.” And I looked at it and I’m like, I’m looking at the ticket history and everything. I’m like, “This gu- this person is on the wrong host.” So I, I, He had already been sent to our recommended resources page, and he was, like, at its w- at his wits’ end of “Dude, I’m gonna have to stop using LifterLMS.”

I’m like, “You’re not having challenges with LifterLMS. You have hosting challenges.” And I did something I normally don’t do, which is I made a specific recommendation and from our hosting recommended resources, ’cause he had already checked it out and he was just feeling lost. And I was like, “Look, I know Tom, the founder of Convesio.

Would you like me to make an introduction?” And this is what’s wild. I, He’s like, “Yes.” And so I made an email introduction to Tom at Convesio, and I went to sleep. The next morning, I woke up, and Tom had already had a call with this frustrated LifterLMS customer who was on hosting that wasn’t a, a good fit.

They had already migrated the site over. Things were working. The client was super happy. Everybody’s happy, and that person is still a awesome LifterLMS user and is super happy on Convesio The next one is Presidium, which is a high-quality host out of Greece, I believe is where they’re located. I’ve met many of their crew at a WordCamp Europe in Athens.

Great company. They’re at that level like Convesio and Levamo and stuff. They’re awesome, so check them out. There’s also a niche host called MemberHost, which h- is carved out a niche in the membership site and LMS niche. The team over there is awesome. They’re super helpful.

They have a lot of high-traffic sites with a lot of demands for concurrent users and dynamic pages and all that stuff. Another one is WP Tonic, which is a great managed LMS host. It’s like a website as a service as well. They have agency options. One of the cool things they do is they bundle in plugin licenses.

So when you sign up with WP Tonic, you get access to things like LifterLMS and all the add-ons. You get access to Fluent CRM, WP Fusion all kinds of kit that an LMS site creator needs. It’s included in the hosting plan. They’re– So that’s a, a great take. Cloudways is another solid managed WordPress host you can check out.

InstaWP has some cool one-click LifterLMS setup and w-

Pretty, pretty neat model for just making it easy to get started while also having high-quality hosting. I also wanna give a hat tip to Pressable for WordPress professionals So check those guys out. GridPane, Patrick and the team over at GridPane is awesome, and they’re more for agencies and people with lots of sites and stuff.

GridPane is super cool, super high quality. Kinsta is another great one. Kinsta’s, in that managed WordPress tier. We have a lot of happy LifterLMS users on Kinsta. Roger and the team over there are awesome. And I also just wanna highlight Hostinger. So Hostinger has some of the most affordable hosting available online in the WordPress space.

And I know a lot of people who are validating, just getting started, wanna keep the cost at a absolute minimum. Hostinger has some really affordable plans. LifterLMS works on there, so go check them out. I also wanna mention our good friends Jason and Kim Coleman over at Paid Memberships Pro. If you’re using Paid Memberships Pro, they have their own hosting as well, which is awesome.

I’ve watched them build that. I’ve watched their customers succeed with that, and that’s incredible ’cause they’re, like, super focused, like Lifter is, on building a solut- a hosting solution that is absolutely 100% perfect for membership sites. We’re doing it for LMS, which also includes membership sites over at Lifter.

So go check out Paid Memberships Pro hosting And I’m sure I missed somebody, by the way. And I’ve been around, I’ve worked with a lot of web hosts. All of them, do care about their customers, but the challenge that happens is like the WordPress theme industry. One of the things I love about our theme, Sky Pilot, the only modern WordPress LMS theme with exclusive focus on LMS, is the focus.

For example, I also love themes like Astra and Kadence, but these are multipurpose themes. They’re designed to work with many different integrations and different use cases, e-commerce sites, brochure sites, massage therapists, restaurants. They’re multipurpose, which is cool. But in the hosting industry, that’s what happens, is a hosting company wants to get as many sites as possible, whereas the hosting we’re building at LifterLMS is all about we’re not trying to get as many sites as possible.

We’re just trying to help our core customer be successful, remove pain points, help them scale, help increase their conversions, make sure they have fast websites, and make sure that the hosting is 100% with blinders on, exclusively focused on the needs of the LMS creator. And that’s the kind of thing that a general web host just can’t do because they have fractured focus So that’s my story.

That’s a journey through hosting WordPress many years. Like our– I’ve shared our personal business story at LifterLMS, and how we’ve been through kinda six different chapters of hosting, and now we’re building our own. So I hope that’s helpful. I would love to hear from you, your experience with hosting, the hosting you love.

Again, our mission at LifterLMS is to be an all-in-one solution for learning management system and the LMS entrepreneur, but we still appreciate value and put effort into our community. So there’s not just one good web host. For example, we integrate with WooCommerce even though we have our own e-commerce system.

We recommend achievement badge solutions and gamification solutions even though we have our own. So that’s the beauty of WordPress is you have all these tools that you can kinda integrate together and it just depends on what’s best for you. So it’s kinda two games we’re playing here. One is to be an all-in-one solution while also being a stand-up member in the community that does integrations really well and encouraging those partnerships and that, that value that exists within the WordPress community ’cause the power of WordPress is not just the software.

The software is awesome. We love it, but the real value in WordPress is the community. It’s, tens of thousands u- or it might even be hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs that are all working around same platform. You can’t do that at a single company. Like I mentioned Leadpages at the beginning.

They’re that’s just one company. There is no Leadpages ecosystem like what we have in WordPress. So that’s my journey with hosting. I hope you found this helpful. I’d love to hear your comments, feedbacks, hear your experience with hosting and check out LifterLMS hosting. Keep an eye on it. That’s at lifterlms.com/hosting.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMScast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at lifterlms.com/gift. Go to lifterlms.com/gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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According to Chris Badgett, artificial intelligence is changing online education, but this does not negate the value of coaches, course designers, and education companies. Since students can now readily obtain material using ChatGPT, Claude, Google, YouTube, and other AI technologies, the value of merely packing content into a course is diminishing.

The true value, according to Chris, is in the human element: personal experience, professional advice, curation, feedback, accountability, community, and the capacity to assist students in truly achieving the desired outcomes. Course designers should concentrate on developing a learning experience that incorporates their own expertise, narratives, tried-and-true techniques, and viewpoint rather than attempting to compete with AI by offering more material. Chris also stresses that rather than entirely replacing educators, AI should be utilized to supplement and improve their work. He presents the 10-80-10 concept, according to which humans first supply context and expertise, AI takes care of most of the job, and humans then evaluate, modify, and contribute the last layer of knowledge and experience. In his opinion, human engagement is particularly crucial for community interactions, coaching, grading, and feedback.

While AI may help with certain activities, humans still need to be involved to give context, emotional intelligence, and intuition. Because students want to engage with real people and gain knowledge from shared experiences, Chris also emphasizes the increasing significance of cohort-based learning, live events, coaching, and communities. In the end, his message is that information by itself is no longer the product; rather, it is the human experience that surrounds that knowledge. Instead of taking the human element out of education, AI and automation could help businesses grow that experience.

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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 Chris Badgett, and in this episode, we’re gonna talk about why students pay you when AI is free. So essentially, what we’re gonna get into here today is how to use AI correctly in your business and why you, the human, is super important, and the parts of what you do as a human being is not disruptable by AI as a course creator, as a coach, as somebody running an education company.

So one thing that’s important to get in your mindset is that students or your learners have the same AI tools that you do. So they could have gotten the information for free, but why would somebody sign up with you? We’ve heard this argument before “Why would I create a course about X if that information is free on YouTube?”

But AI has increased the challenge with this problem. So what is it that is actually happening so that you as a human provide value on top of just knowledge and information? We’re gonna dive deep into that in this episode. By the way, I am not anti-AI. I think AI is a powerful tool to augment and help you, but there are certain things that just cannot be handed off to AI, and if you do, you’re making a critical mistake So where we’re at in the timeline of things, if you’ve heard of the book by Tim Ferriss called The 4-Hour Workweek, that came out about 17 years ago or something like that, and it was basically about automating and outsourcing your life so that you as a human only have to work four hours a week.

That’s cool. I’m a big fan of automation and delegation and, building a business that’s not dependent on you, the human. But this… the point of this episode is all about the value that you as a human, as a course creator, as a coach, as an education company entrepreneur bring to the table. The challenge is that AI tempts you to hand off the teaching itself and that’s not what you wanna do.

You can do a lot with AI, and I’m not saying you shouldn’t, but it’s not oh, I have a perfect PhD-level employee that can just do my job as a course creator or as a coach for me. So again, this is not against AI. It’s just how to think about the position of the human as a teacher, a coach, as a education entrepreneur, and what you should not give to AI tools like Claude or ChatGPT.

So the reality is with a lot of online courses information products as they’re known, like courses as an example, if it’s just pure information, that model is dying, and the demand is essentially done for that because, at first it was hard to find the information, then search engines made it easier, and then you can find stuff on YouTube.

But even when YouTube came out, why did so many course creators and coach-type professionals remain successful? And we’ll get into that in a little bit, but these services are super helpful, but they’re not a replacement for you as a human being, and you have to use the tools correctly in order to maintain your value in the market.

So let’s talk about the value stack. There’s many layers to the value stack. We have information, like if your course is just informational, that kind of course business is dying because we can find it in a Google search, we can find it on YouTube, we can ask ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Grok, whatever tool we’re using, and just get information.

So information, i.e. information products, is not what we’re selling today if we want to be successful. Of course, you need to include information in the stack, but that’s not the whole story. So the next piece is what I call curation. So in a world of infinite information, ChatGPT never sleeps, YouTube never sleeps, Google Search never sleeps, the value comes from curating and finding the most effective, important content, helpful information, and so on.

So that curation is a very human thing that you can do to add more value to your information product, your course, your membership, your coaching program. ‘Cause it’s not about knowing everything you can about a car problem as an example. It’s about which bolt to turn at the right time, how, and as, in as few steps as possible.

We mentioned the four-hour workweek earlier. I just wanna give a highlight to Tim Ferriss. He’s a great guy, great thinker, love the book, and he has this concept called minimum effective dose. So the minimum effective dose is when it comes to information- What’s the minimum amount of information I can give in my course, my coaching program, or my membership to deliver the result to the learner as quickly as possible?

And that minimum effective dose, we have to look behind that and look at the m- mechanisms and mechanics behind that. What makes minimum effective dose possible is high-quality curation. So one of the things as a subject matter expert that you have to get good at is knowing your space, curating, looking at all the information, and distilling it down to the minimum effective information that achieves the result that you promise in your marketing.

So the other thing that’s really valuable that AI can’t do as well as a human is provide feedback. So if you’re running a course and you have quizzes and assessments, or you’re running a coaching program and you send your client out to do some actions and do something that you recommend They’re gonna need feedback on the performance of whatever it is they do.

Now, it’s true you can use tool, tools like WP Vibe to help grade your quizzes and assignments and things like that, but I always recommend a human in the loop to r- if AI’s helping with the feedback, the human needs to come in with the human emotional living brain and pro- edit that stuff and provide valuable feedback from intuition and experience and context that creator has as a human being in the space.

So the other thing is accountability and, belonging. If you build a community, if community is part of what you do in your educational product the idea of just having an AI agent drop in and, moderate your community and answer questions, that’s cool, that’s interesting, but that’s not what people are signing up for.

They don’t wanna just join a community of robots. They wanna interact with real human beings, other people in the cohort or in the community, and just hear their lived experience and ideas. ‘Cause if they just wanted AI input, the thing that people aren’t thinking about is they can get that now. They can just go to ChatGPT or Claude or whatever and get feedback.

They’re paying you for human feedback. So that’s what it’s all about in terms of some of the high-level concepts. But let’s dig in a little deeper. So AI has no stake in the results of your learners. AI and the way AI works is it’s pr- processing information, it’s trying to be helpful, it’s predicting the next word or trying to answer a question to the best of its ability based on the training, but it does not understand the emotional value of humans interacting with other humans, trying to help other humans.

An AI cannot be disappointed. It cannot be proud. It loses nothing if the learner quits. It’s just there in the system trying to pr- provide in- helpful information given the context that it has access to. So the way I think about this is you have what’s known as a customer avatar or your ideal learner profile, and when they are In your course or in your membership or in your coaching program they need you.

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They need you, the human. They’re not signing up to get advice from AI. In fact, they already have probably tried that before they came to you. So they want you, the human. It doesn’t mean that you- the AI is not helpful to your ideal customer avatar or profile. It just means that the reason they’re joining your course or your coaching program or your training-based membership site is that they want some real human lived experience, feedback, and input The other thing that’s really foundational to all of this is what I call the human knowledge dump, which we go over in how to create an online course with AI.

It’s a free course we have on the LifterLMS Academy. You should check it out. But that’s a very intentional step, and just to describe what it is, if you try to create a course outline with AI, or you try to create course content with AI, even if it’s as simple as text-based lessons, it will do a good job.

But if you don’t inject your human knowledge as an individual, I call that the human knowledge dump, you’re just getting the mass market large language model, or LLM, output to that area of content, whether that’s a lesson or whatever. So the human knowledge dump, when you’re creating a course as an example, or you’re training an AI to help you with your coaching, is you have to inject your own life experience, your own stories, your own favorite resources, even if they’re not your own, that you look to for guidance when you’re trying to help another human being.

That human knowledge dump step is really the most time-consuming part of working with AI. So if you’re working with AI and you’re trying to get something done, if you just say, “Create me a course about X,” or, “Create me saved responses for these types of challenges my coaching clients have,” and you don’t interject all of your existing experience and references and stories and whatnot, the AI is just gonna give generic examples, which may be helpful to a level.

But remember, there’s only one you. People are signing up for not just information, but access to you. Now, it’s true, you can train AI to be a little more helpful and have more context on your proven playbooks, methodologies, resources, and all of that But this kind of tacit knowledge is something that AI just does not have.

So the human should, build the course outline, should build the playbooks for working with coaching clients. And AI can draft and be helpful and fill in holes, I call it gaps, but what you wanna do is actually, put a lot of yourself in the product. Now, you can do some of that by getting yourself and providing more context into AI, but when you’re working an actual living, breathing online course, coaching program, internal training program, the human has to stay in the loop and be involved.

So the AI drafts, the human decides, the human edits, the human adds more context. That’s the signature before the response ships, whether that’s a course outline, course content, a response to a coaching client’s question conversations in the online community, and so on. If you’re doing grading and things like that with a learning management system like LifterLMS, you can bring AI in to do a first pass on the grading, but I’m a huge believer in the human in the loop.

This is like the four-hour workweek, and I think Tim got it right. He did not say the zero-hour workweek. And that’s what a lot of folks are trying to do, to their own detriment, is they’re trying to delegate everything to the artificial intelligence, which is a big mistake. In my opinion, the human should always be in the loop and be very much involved on the front end and the back end of whatever you’re doing with AI.

This is like the 10-80-10 principle, which is if you’re gonna work with AI, don’t give it 100%. You as a human, whatever you’re doing, put your 10% human magic on the front end, crafting good prompts and doing everything to provide context. Let AI go to work and do the 80% of the work.

But then when it’s done, don’t just say, “Sounds great, thumbs up,” and pass that information along to the finished product of whatever it is you’re doing. Add another 10% on the end to review, to be helpful, and, provide more context, provide more human stories. Write with your hands and, just create an exceptional product.

So don’t do the zero-hour workweek with AI. So the hidden cost is when you automate feedback and go blind to your own curriculum, you’re just removing yourself from the product you sold and you promised in the first place. So don’t do that. Again, this is not anti-AI. It can be super helpful. But your students, your coaching clients, your members are already running these tools too, so inject yourself in the process and understand the value of your own unique perspective, ideas, and the things that you bring to the table, and put that into your product.

So let’s talk about where the durable money is. So- I’m just gonna give you some examples from the LifterLMS community. So I wanna mention Michael Wolfe, who’s a course creator and coach. He’s an amazing human being. He’s been on this podcast before. You can find it. I honestly don’t know how much or how little Michael uses AI, but he has 33 courses, 3,000 lessons, and one of the cool things that Michael does that I’ve seen him do is coaching is a huge part of what they do.

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So they’re not just buying access to content, they’re buying access to group and sometimes private one-on-one coaching calls. Michael has run virtual and in-person events, so it’s very human what he does. So 3,000 lessons is a lot. If you have a huge corpus of work AI may be able to help you do some of the lessons, but in Michael’s cake- case, he does a lot of stuff with language coming from the Hebrew and Greek language, and AI translates it for free, but the business still stands because of all the coaching, community, event-based work, and real human work that Michael does.

I also wanna mention Tim McIvor, who does continuing education in the school psychologist niche. So this is where school psychologists have to earn continuing education credits to maintain their license and keep their jobs and get smarter and stay up to speed on what’s going on in their industry.

So Michael… or Tim McIvor has a lot of one-lesson mini courses, which are actually webinars that are delivered by humans delivering continuing education content. So if you think about the continuing education industry all those people can go to AI and type in chats about, “Hey, what’s new in our industry?”

“Give me information about my industry,” and so on. But what Tim MacGiver has done is digitize the human teaching so that it goes from conference rooms and hotels and conference centers to a, a more digital, infinitely scalable format. But there’s so much humanity involved in his continuing education.

He’s not just cranking out continuing education courses that a ChatGPT or Claude invented to provide the contin- continuing education credits. So events are becoming more and more valuable in the age of AI in the education concept. So if you’re not doing events, I would encourage you to do that. We’ve also looked at some of the statistics on course completion.

And when you do cohort-based courses according to a study by Rizuku, which is another LMS, a S- a SaaS LMS, they found that cohort-based courses have 64% completion rates, whereas self-paced courses have around 45% completion rates. So just that one data point right there shows you the power of a cohort, i.e.

community, moving through a course together as a community, taking lessons at the same time, asking questions in the community at the same time. It’s that human element of a cohort that makes community-based courses and cohort-based courses more effective in terms of completion rates. So if you’re using LifterLMS, we have a cohorts add-on so that you can do, easily do cohort-based courses, and I highly recommend that.

So when you think about the humans, not just using AI to pass information across inside of an online course, but if you think about humans in a cohort learning and growing together at the same time, that’s a really powerful thing to increase learning effectiveness and getting the results basically and whatever was promised in the course.

So The, the key thing here with AI is just to remember human in the loop, and we’re not going for a zero-hour work week. Everybody I know that works heavily with AI has never been more busy productive. They’re even having challenges in their personal life in terms of they’re just so overwhelmed by all the opportunity and all the things they can automate and all those, all the things they can do with AI, but they’re becoming more productive.

There’s something called Jevons paradox, which means that as a system comes into society that heavily incr- increases efficiency, the paradox is that system was supposed to give us a zero-hour work week, but we actually start working a lot more because of the efficiency and the increase in our productivity.

So Jevons paradox comes from when we introduced the steam engine in the industrial age. People didn’t work less after that came. They actually started working more, and I see that going on with AI, and that whole thing can be really overwhelming when you start getting really productive with AI. There’s just more stuff you can do.

But should you prioritize that? Should you be working on that? That’s just a challenge you need to introspect on. And also, the idea of unplugging from automation and AI and just being a human, helping other humans, has never been more important. So- Your expertise is not just knowledge. That’s what I want you to really take away from this episode.

Again, Google search, YouTube videos, and now AI. Knowledge is infinite. People can go find stuff on their own. So when you’re just selling information, those are the course businesses that are dying because you’re just basically repackaging what’s already available. But what can’t be repackaged is your unique human experience, the way that you provide additional context, stories, curation, and just the human element to an experience.

So we’re not just selling information, we’re creating learning experiences. Knowledge, what AI is literally intelligence, which is knowledge, is just a fraction of the pie chart. So all those other things you can do by creating community through cohorts or other means, in person or virtually, providing coaching and feedback in a one-on-one or group context.

These are part of what only a human can do. And remember, when people buy from you, especially if you’re trying to charge at higher price points, they’re not just paying for information, they’re also paying for access to you and others on the journey like them in terms of community. So if you’re digging what we’re talking about here, and you’re using AI heavily in your courses and coaching programs and training-based membership sites, I would encourage you to reach out to your learners and ask them why they bought from you instead of asking Google, YouTube, or ChatGPT or Claude.

What is the reason? ‘Cause you may not realize how valuable you really are as a human being in your space. So whatever those people say is your actual product. The knowledge, the information, the intelligence is, of course, important. It’s a part of what you offer. It is your information product, if you will.

But people don’t just want information. There’s more they want, and the, the more that they want is really related to the human element that you provide as a course creator, as a coach, as a education entrepreneur. So from the beginning of LifterLMS, we always had this saying, and I wanna give credit where credit is due to my original LifterLMS co-founder.

His name is Joshua Milich. And Joshua said in the early days of LifterLMS is that what we’re doing is we’re scaling the human touch with robotics. So we’re creating tons of automation. You can build a course or membership or school without needing the infrastructure that was previously required for example, an actual brick-and-mortar school or a stage to speak on.

There’s so much automation that happens in LifterLMS. It’s why people buy the software to, be more effective through high-powered automation in terms of things like e-commerce, engagement, membership- LMS things like reporting, progress tracking, grading, and so on. So we’ve always been inside this story, which is, scaling the human touch with robotics.

But our goal was never to make the human completely disappear. And going back to where we started in this episode, I think Tim Ferriss nailed it with the title of his popular book called The 4-Hour Workweek. And what I mean by that is, again, it’s not the zero-hour workweek, it’s four hours. So in that context, that’s 10% of the time, four out of a 40-hour workweek.

What does the human need to do? Like, why does the human still have four hours in the workweek if we have all this awesome automation and outsourcing and delegation? So I would encourage you to think about your most important four hours. And what I find is a lot of the best education entrepreneurs, they don’t work four hours a week.

They work like 40 hours a week or 30 hours a week or even 60, 70 hours a week because they love what they do. So use AI, use automation, use YouTube, get your information so it shows up in Google and all that stuff, but optimize the human element so that your courses, memberships, and coaching programs are not just information.

So put you and your team, if you have one, inside the product and don’t try to automate or give everything to AI to the point where you’re not needed because that’s not what the market wants. The market wants you. They’re signing up for you. They’re signing up for a human experience.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMScast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS.com/gift. Go to LifterLMS.com/gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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In this episode of LMScast, Chris Badgett and Craig Shoemaker discuss how course designers and education entrepreneurs can boost revenue without continually pursuing new clients. The conversation is on developing more compelling offerings, enhancing the customer experience, forging deep connections, and adjusting to an AI-driven future while maintaining the human aspect.

According to Craig, one of the most common errors made by course designers is to concentrate only on making a course rather than establishing a comprehensive product. By providing only one pricing choice and neglecting to incorporate upsells, order spikes, premium tiers, or surprise bonuses that thrill clients, many firms lose money. Chris concurs that the offer is the cornerstone of any successful education company as flaws in the offer have an impact on all other aspects of marketing and sales.

The significance of looking beyond the original transaction is another important subject. Craig advises business owners to inquire, “What happens next?” following each client activity. There should always be a clear next step that strengthens the relationship, whether someone downloads a lead magnet, buys a course, or completes a program. Chris elaborates on this by offering useful tactics, such as utilizing thank-you sites to present supplementary materials during periods of strong consumer engagement rather than only instructing people to check their mailbox.

Craig also considers his own career, in which he made over $2.5 million in royalties from Pluralsight-published web development courses. Changes to the company’s royalty arrangement significantly decreased his revenue, despite the platform’s great popularity. He learned from that experience how risky it is to rely solely on third-party platforms and how crucial it is to own your audience thru email lists, lead magnets, and direct customer interactions rather than relying on the business of others.

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Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

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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. His name is Craig Shoemaker. You can find him at craigshoemaker.net. Craig works one-on-one with education entrepreneurs to help them spot problems and opportunities they’re often too close to see their own course or membership businesses.

Craig also has a fascinating story from his own career as a course creator. He earned more than 2.5 million in royalties from web development courses and generated hundreds of thousands of watch hours. But when the company he published his courses with changed its author agreement, his royalties were cut by 68%.

That experience changed the way Craig thinks about audience ownership, platform dependence, and the idea that not all money is good money. Craig now helps other education entrepreneurs make more intentional decisions, get more value from the audience they already have, and work out where human judgment and leadership still matter as AI changes the education market.

Craig, welcome to the show. 

Craig Shoemaker: Thanks, Chris. Appreciate it. Glad to be here. 

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Yeah. I’m stoked to get into it, especially with another podcaster. Craig’s podcast is The Growth Question, and you’re gonna make it easy ’cause you’re a pro podcaster- … and you’ve been creating media and courses for a long time.

But the first thing I wanted to ask you is, what do you see when you look at an education business that the owner is often too close to see? 

Craig Shoemaker: That is like the question, isn’t it? Because there’s so many d- th- usually what happens with an education business is it’s usually one person. Maybe there’s a small team, but they’re having to be responsible for being a domain expert in what they’re doing marketing, doing outreach, handling the financials.

And so there’s so much surface area for blind spots that there’s a lot of opportunity there. But I’d say one of the things that I find most often comes up is the way that the, the offer is constructed. And so a lot of times what course creators will do is they’ll create a course, and they’ll put it out there and they say, “Hey, it’s available for, whatever price point.”

What I’ve found is that if you don’t have multiple options available, so maybe like different tiers, or maybe you skip doing order bumps, or you don’t have an upsell available in your funnel. Or one of my favorite things, if you don’t have a surprise, if you don’t give people something that they never saw coming to create that goodwill, that these are things that people have often either never thought about or haven’t thought about it deeply enough to be able to integrate it in with what they’re doing.

Chris Badgett: I love that. Yeah, the offer is core, and if you mess that up- 

Craig Shoemaker: Yeah … 

Chris Badgett: or if you have challenges with it, everything else is downstream from that. What are some more detailed offer mistakes- 

… 

Chris Badgett: Or gaps- 

Craig Shoemaker: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: that you see in the patterns of the people you work with or in the market in general?

Craig Shoemaker: I think a lot of times people will– they’ll create their checkout process or their order process, and then they won’t pay attention to the question of what happens next. And you get the chance to answer that question or pose that question all through the process. So when someone opts in to maybe a lead magnet, what are you showing on the thank you page, that confirmation page?

That, that’s one of the biggest buyer intent signals that people will have is the fact that they’re like raising their hand, saying, “I want you to contact me.” And often, and I’ve certainly been guilty of this myself, is that you’ll throw up a, a standard or, kind of template thank you page and go from there and hope your email sequence kicks in.

So that’s one place where you can say what happens next?” When you get people into the buyer flow and they’re, they’ve got that momentum going, and then they’re purchasing your main course or program, whatever they came to, on the other side of that, are you pitching something different or bigger to them in terms of an upsell?

So what happens next there? But then the one that kind of hides in the shadows a little bit is that once they’ve made a purchase, and maybe once they’ve begin going through your program what happens next after that? We don’t wanna be satisfied that they just started the program. We want to create a relationship with the people that we’re working with and figure out what does that entire customer journey look like?

Chris Badgett: I love that. I think that’s like thinking through time is the biggest unlock you can do. The customer journey before they buy from you, after they buy from you. It’s not just, “I have a product, here it is.” 

Craig Shoemaker: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: What types of course and membership business owners come to you for coaching?

What do you notice that’s in common with them? 

Craig Shoemaker: So I’ve had people everywhere from medical doctors to people who help independent authors sell ads, to YouTube scriptwriters, to guitar teachers. And so the commonality isn’t in what they teach. The commonality usually is the … a question that sits behind the next decision that I have to make, especially ’cause I’m usually doing everything alone what is that decision going to cost me?”

Maybe I’ve put together this program, I’ve r- built this community, and I’ve been successful doing it, but I’m not … I think I know how I did it. Maybe I could do it again. And it’s just living within that uncertainty of saying “Okay I’ve built something and I’ve established resonance with my audience, but now I need to figure out where that next step lies and make sure that I’m heading in the right direction.”

Chris Badgett: I think that’s a backbone of good coaching programs where people hit some kind of growth ceiling. Whatever that is in terms of operations or sales or just figuring out how to move forward and scale, basically. Yeah. Yeah. And that’s awesome. I’ve seen so many coaching programs across different industries that it’s really

It’s not the beginners. Beginners need coaching, but the people that are hitting growth ceilings raise their hand. They have budget- 

Craig Shoemaker: Yeah … 

Chris Badgett: typically, and they’re ready to invest in themselves, and they’re humble enough to realize, “I don’t have all the answers and I need help,” and raise their hand.

Craig Shoemaker: Yeah.

And that’s what makes working with people at that stage really fun and interesting because they have all the levers to pull. When we’re starting out and we’re beginning we’re trying to find ourselves and trying to figure out who, what sort of audience we resonate and that’s hard work.

But I found the, the way that I can help people most is when you have the, the mechanisms available to be able to say, “Okay we can at least test this idea because there’s an audience there,” or, “We can adjust pricing here because we know people are buying at this point.” And that’s what makes it fun because you can see the results a little bit faster.

Chris Badgett: Tell us the story of the 2.5 million in royalties from web development courses, and what happened there. What did the business look like at its peak? Yeah. And I know they, they changed their royalty agreement. I’m guessing this might be Udemy, but it could have been something else. What- 

Craig Shoemaker: N- 

Chris Badgett: What’s the 

Craig Shoemaker: story?

Not Udemy. So I try to, I describe it as it was basically Netflix for developers, right? And the I was very entrenched in the tech community and knew a lot of people who… i’ve published books, I’ve written for magazines, done conference talks and when I lived in Southern California, I would build a, a, a technology talk and then go on tour to all the different user groups in the area and did all that.

So I n- I was around the people who were about the business of teaching technology to our market. And there’s a, a, a group of developers in that community that started this this company called Pluralsight, and the idea was that basically they would get the best developers they could find to build courses for the the developer community.

And what’s so cool about it is that what they did is they didn’t overlap content. So if you had the course on beginning web development, anybody who used that service all around the world was going into that course. And I just so happened to be in the fortunate position to be able to do some of the very basics of web development.

So as their audience and as their reach grew, more and more people were watching my content. And it was… I learned so much about how to build good courses, how to communicate with people, and yeah just loved doing it. But a- as most companies do they grow, and they were bought and sold a few different times, and then they decided, okay what we need to do is basically change how we’re handling the the author agreements.

And so with that change, so did my royalties. And so- What 

Chris Badgett: year are we talking about? What time period is this? 

Craig Shoemaker: ’22, ’21, somewhere around there. And so th- what I wanted to do was, like, okay i- instead of continuing to push through a, a system that’s changed a lot, I realized I’ve had all this experience as an author, as a speaker, as a course creator, as someone who’s built courses that resonate well with people.

I want to take my experience and help other people build their businesses in a way that can, just be worthwhile. And part of that story, part of that scene was, like, I I wasn’t in the sort of- I didn’t understand at the time how valuable it would be for me to basically just put up a lead magnet within my courses and begin to build my own audience in parallel with everything that I was doing there so I could make my own offers.

And so this whole idea of not seeing your blind spots and paying the price for it is something that I’ve lived out 

Chris Badgett: So you felt that pain personally with the- Oh, yeah. 

Craig Shoemaker: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And then describe the pivot to coaching. Do you mostly do coaching? Do you still make courses? How do you… what did you pivot to?

Craig Shoemaker: Yeah. So I’m doing coaching with my clients one-on-one now. I still do the… I actually got contacted recently about making a- another course there in terms of the technology stuff, and then I, building some courses and digital products within my within my business right now.

But my main focus is working one-on-one with people because when you have a longer engagement with someone, you get to know their business, you get to know their habits, and you get to know how they think. And when I’m in that position, I’m able to help orient people’s business and growth in a way that you can’t do if you just meet once and then you go on from there.

And so it’s in building those relationships that I really get to have, have an impact in what people are doing. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. I’m a big fan of courses, coaching, and community, and you don’t always- Yeah … have to do all three or do all three equally, but, a c- coaching is very different from courses.

Craig Shoemaker: Yeah.

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Chris Badgett: But it… But like you said, it’s more personalized, and you can drive impact, and you have a lot more unique context to help people. Did you go the kind of individual coaching route, or do you do group coaching or a combination? 

Craig Shoemaker: Right now it’s individuals. It’s all one-on-one, yeah. I’d like to do group co- coaching in the future.

It’s… I’m just gonna see how that evolves a little bit. But yeah it’s getting down into the weeds with the individual right now is the w- where I can pull those levers the hardest. 

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Tell us more about the patterns and when you get into the coaching, and we talked about working on the core offer and thinking through time and customer journey.

What else are big areas where you unlock growth or get people unstuck or remove bottlenecks? 

Craig Shoemaker: This is gonna sound so cliche, okay? 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. 

Craig Shoemaker: But it’s true and that is around mindset. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. 

Craig Shoemaker: Almost every one of my clients has been, at one point or another, essentially afraid to raise their prices, change their pricing, d- or go into a different area of expert- N- not totally wildly different, but y- just mindset stuff holding them back from either creating a new part of their program.

But particularly it comes down to pricing. And- There’s I think there’s just something in that situation to where you’re the single person, you feel like everything’s on your shoulders. You don’t want to make a mistake that will adversely affect, the wellbeing of you and your family, and so there’s fear there.

And so a lot of times I’ve been able to say, “Okay we can w- we can test in certain areas we can set up different kind of boundaries, make you feel comfortable.” But for the most part, it’s usually just by facing that area of saying I’ve never charged this much before,” or, “I’ve n- I’ve never…”

Maybe, I’ve, I had one person who essentially trained his audience to expect really low prices from him, and he was sweating bullets the first time I said, “We’re gonna, we’re gonna build a high-ticket, $5,000 a person mentorship program, and you’re gonna sell it to your audience.” And I don’t think he slept well the night before he launched it, but then when he sold out, he was sleeping actually quite well.

And so we all have it. We all have those, those areas that, that require some extra push. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Super valuable. And the mindset like imposter syndrome, fear of failure, fear of success- Yeah … financial insecurity. Yeah it’s such… Nobody can escape it. 

Craig Shoemaker: No. 

Chris Badgett: Anybody I’ve ever talked to, no matter whether they’re in software or digital products, physical products, when you bring up pricing, it’s always, there’s all this fear and what if it breaks or whatever.

What about like funnels as an example? What kind of gaps do you see people making in terms of the funnel? More on the before the conversion, what are people just not doing or doing poorly- 

… 

Chris Badgett: In their funnels? 

Craig Shoemaker: It’s the basics. The, the funny thing is that there’s so much information, like, being thrown at us all the time.

I think the thing that stops us from doing it is the fact that, one, one podcast will say one thing, one blog will say another, one email list will say this, and you just get… unless you really focus, that’s the, the thing that stops you. And so I would say that the, the gap is the ability to focus.

To be able to say, “Okay, I’m gonna take this one technique,” so maybe it’s confirmation or thank you pages. Okay, make sure when someone opts in for your thing, that the response that they get back, independent of the email that’s sent to their inbox, is congruent with whatever offer you want to pitch them in the future.

Maybe that’s an opportunity for you to give something generously to them at that point, and just do something different than what everyone else is doing other than, “Hey, you’re on the list. Congratulations. You might hear from me again.” So that’s one of the things. One of the other things is just being able to truly understand the progression between, okay, I have this thing that I wanna offer people.

Low ticket, high ticket, doesn’t matter. But again, that whole idea of congruence. Okay if I have a lead magnet or if I’m post- posting social content, h- how much does it make sense for them go from point A to point B to where I want them to go? Or am I just creating things because it’s fun or it’s exciting or it’s the trend or whatever?

And so it’s about being really intentional about saying, “This is the first problem I need to solve for people, and that will unlock the second problem, which is the thing that I can really provide for them.” 

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And I just wanna share a pro tip. Something I do that I learned is if, and this doesn’t apply to everybody, but on a lead magnet thank you page, one of the things I do is put in a little pause of five minutes before they get the lead magnet, and on the thank you page, I think the email might still send relatively quickly, but even email deliverability takes time sometimes.

But- … the basic idea is, “Thanks, your resource is on the way. While you wait, check out this thing.” And it might be, like, something further down the funnel, like a prerecorded webinar or something else. And you’re not gonna catch everybody, but it’s like the, the idea of a one-time offer, but just with- Yeah

information. And it works, and they still get the lead magnet or whatever, and they- Yeah … and it, the… I think of fast lane, slow lane, sidewalk buyers or whatever that framework is. 

Craig Shoemaker: Okay. 

Chris Badgett: If somebody’s on the fast lane they may be like, “Oh forget about a lead magnet. This thing further down I’m super interested in,” they just move faster through.

It’s just a fun little trick I learned that works. 

Craig Shoemaker: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: But it’s stuff like that, thinking through time,

if you could have a moment, instead of saying, “Thanks, check your inbox,” or whatever “Hey, while you wait, check out this cool thing real quick.” I don’t know. It’s just fun stuff like that.

Yeah. Once you start thinking in time and shaping experience there’s just so much you can do, and it’s all about adding value, not upselling and a million one-time offers or whatever. Yeah. Although that’s good, too, but not necess- but you have to do it in alignment with what’s right for them at that stage.

Craig Shoemaker: Yes. So I love the phrasing that you’re using, thinking in time, because I think that takes out the sense of urgency in terms of I have to pitch them with all of this stuff, as soon as possible. A 

Chris Badgett: one shot. Yeah. One opportunity, Eminem style. 

Craig Shoemaker: Yeah. No multiple shots. And the way I like to phrase it for myself in my own coaching, but also with the clients I work with, is just how can we serve people the most powerfully, right? And when you use that mindset, then it’s less transactional and becomes more relational. And you can do that at scale.

You can care about people and their and their transformation even when you’re talking to a, a large number of people. But it’s the fact that the word I like to come back to is just being intentional about it and knowing why you’re doing what you’re doing for the benefit of the people you’re serving.

Chris Badgett: You mentioned relational. I’m a framework guy, so I’m dropping another one, which is, like, when it comes to marketing and sales, I see three buckets: inbound, which is content marketing; outbound, which is prospecting. Like you, you prospected to get on the show, and now you’re on the show.

I 

Craig Shoemaker: did. Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: And then there’s relationships, and what I find is that entrepreneurs tend to have one of those be their superpower. 

Like for the work I do I’m primarily an inbound guy first, relationships second, outbound third. I do all of them. 

But I think the relationship-based marketing, sales, and business is is misunderstood, and people don’t quite realize that.

So you mentioned a lot, like maybe in your own business and with your client business, if somebody wants to leverage relationships, not just s- so I get more whatever, but in a win-win format. 

Craig Shoemaker: Yeah.

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Chris Badgett: How can entrepreneurs do better-based, relationship-based growth and scaling to either optimize what they already have or bust through that growth ceiling?

Craig Shoemaker: I think that’s getting easier now than ever. Okay, so you talked about how I prospected to get on the show. Yeah. And so we were talking a little bit before we hit record about the fact that I’ve built a booking agent that runs in the background, and what it does is basically scours the web to try and look for podcasts where I might be a good fit to come on as a guest.

That’s using systems automation in order to shortcut the part of the process that would be the most painful for me, which would be doing all the searches, trying to find the fit, and all that kind of stuff. So I can just hand that over to a machine. I don’t care, right? But then when it came time for me to send you an email, I made sure that I went through and I got to– tried to get to know you from a distance a little bit.

I watched some of- … some of your interviews, got a sense of what you did, and then wrote you a personal email in order to say, “Hey, if you’re interested, I’d love to come and have a chat with you.” And so I think more and more as the world is moving towards automation, is moving towards really sterile, soulless ways of communicating, that adding in those areas that kind of show, number one I cared enough to take the time to, to value you as a person, to be able to reach out in this way.

And we can talk about that at scale in a second. But n-number two, that I literally was the person on the keyboard doing it. I think there’s a texture to that, that, that comes across hopefully at least enough for people to be able to feel it. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. 

Craig Shoemaker: And so I was just gonna say that for at the scale situation, it’s just it’s basically, being transparent enough to say “Here’s the areas of my business that are automated, that I have AI take care of,” and trust me, I do a lot of that.

Having a technology background I try to leverage as, as much as possible. But then to be able to tell people like, I’m… Customer interviews is something that I, I- is a big thing that I harp on a lot with my clients. Because when you’re teaching and you’re selling programs at scale, sure, you talk to your customers, you answer questions, you do support, all that kind of stuff.

But that’s a very distinct difference than getting on a call like this and asking very pointed questions about what’s important to them, how they found you, what they thought of the program and things of that nature. And so you can build those areas of relationship- … even when you’re working at scale, as long as try hard to make it happen.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, and in a AI world, I think relationships just become even more valuable. And I think sometimes people don’t realize … Do you know Dunbar’s number or whatever? 

Craig Shoemaker: No. 

Chris Badgett: So Dunbar’s number is that the human animal is designed to have relationships with 150 people. It’s like the size- Okay. Yeah, I 

Craig Shoemaker: have- … of a 

Chris Badgett: tribe.

Craig Shoemaker: Yeah. Okay. 

Chris Badgett: So we have, in our genetics or whatever, that kind of capacity. Yet we find ourselves in a world with social media, email lists, and all that stuff. So we’re still like our biology isn’t ca- has not caught up to our current reality. And I think the like even just shallow connections, like actually engaging in a conversation on social media with somebody you don’t know, like these shallow, the shallow network of relationships have a, hold a lot of power.

And as more automation and everything comes in, it doesn’t mean automate everything. It’s, you’re still pe- what I’m saying is the human connection is becoming even more valuable- 

Craig Shoemaker: Yeah … 

Chris Badgett: in an automated world. 

Craig Shoemaker: Yeah, 100%. Yeah. And, and- What do you- I was just saying- Go … and we, we’ll get to a point, and we are now, but you can generate video.

And so being able to give the tells, the, like the very human tells to be able to say, like even if I’m gonna cold pitch you, to be on the podcast or to be a client or something like that, and I send you a video or whatever, it’s like just being able to connect, look into the camera and I don’t even know what the distinction is anymore but to be able to find those ways to be able to show that humanness is there is is a huge deal.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. I asked somebody once, what’s the difference between a high-ticket program and a low-ticket program, and he answered with one word, and he said fidelity. And I had to look it up and see what he meant. But it’s really access. Like- 

Craig Shoemaker: Yeah … 

Chris Badgett: you could have $100 course, but if somebody has access to you on a monthly or weekly or whatever- Yeah

coaching call or some kind of coaching format, that’s a different product altogether. 

Craig Shoemaker: Oh, 100%. Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: What’s your advice for somebody, for a coach to transition from courses? In the sense that from where I sit, like, looking at AI and information, and, we have a course tool that has some community and coaching features in it and stuff, but I’m finding that courses are, just on the macro level, are becoming a little less valuable.

And that human connection, like the coaching and the community, becoming more valuable. 

Craig Shoemaker: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: Not that courses are dying or dead or anything like that. They serve a place. They’re not going anywhere, just like books are still here. 

But and there’s only one you if you’re a coach. 

Craig Shoemaker: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: So that’s the, that’s one of the mindset things is like, yeah, I help businesspeople or whatever, but there’s already this famous business guru who said it all. But that’s not … I would be intimidated going to Tony Robbins for- … a private coaching call on personal development. I’d rather go to somebody who’s 60 that had a very similar life journey as me, even if they’re not well-known, but they’ve got what I want, and they’re, like, a kind, helpful person.

Craig Shoemaker: Yeah. Yeah. I love that. Okay. So I think there’s a couple different questions in there. So the first one would be, like, how would you move into to coaching if you’re selling courses? And I’d say it’s a really natural progression. And on my website, the the, the hero text at the moment says, “Knowledge is now free or paid for your judgment.”

The whole idea of the fact that the procedural information that we have to sell, yes, is valuable because it’s organized, and it’s tested, and it’s vetted, and all that kind of stuff. And y- I even have a thing to where you can… I’ll show you how to put an AI model in the place of you as the teacher, and you get to see how well it can teach what your, what your program is.

But the fact of the matter is that the, the facts and the procedure are just one part of it, and that is enough for some people. They can just buy your course, they can learn the thing and go on. But other people want to know what that looks like in context and like you said, against the reality of someone who’s lived it.

And so a model will be incredibly confidently wrong sometimes, and if you don’t know where those dividing lines are, then you can be set off in the wrong direction pretty fast. And so as an education entrepreneur, being able to say y- and I like getting really practical here right now, right? So let’s say you, you have a course, maybe you have a community, and you want to start doing some sort of coaching or something one-on-one.

I would say look for building the high-ticket thing first. Create something where you can serve people really powerful. Charge an amount for it that scares you a little bit but also gets you to the point to where you know that if someone goes through this time with you, the transformation that they have at the end of it will be well worth it.

I always say anything we do should ultimately be free, right? Because people should be able to take what they’re in the, the business education con- context of it, right? But you work on building something that excites you to work on with your clients. It excites them to be able to get th- the transformation they’re looking for, and then you can prove out what that relationship looks like and what’s valuable to people.

And record every call transcript, use that in your research, and then from there you can go on and build maybe other group coaching type of programs and things of that nature. But the, the bottom line is what you have to sell is your judgment, not just your knowledge. 

Chris Badgett: I love that. Yeah, it’s like a different kind of asset.

Yeah. We think of the expert has the, the knowled- there’s a knowledge gap, and we help fill it. But the judgment- … and the discernment- Yeah … is also just as valuable. 

Craig Shoemaker: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: You say that running a, a lot of people are running a business based on instinct instead of intention. Unpack that for us.

And then by the way, guilty as charged. I’ve done a lot of stuff based on- We 

Craig Shoemaker: all 

Chris Badgett: have. 

Craig Shoemaker: Yeah we’re all in this group when you think about all the hats you have to wear as an entrepreneur, usually as a solopreneur. So I couch it in this area because most of the people who are in this arena are either doing it themselves or doing it with a, some virtual assistants for a very small team or whatever.

Even in those contexts, the thing that you’re doing is usually trying to run to an understanding of this, what is it that I’m selling? That’s the first thing that people want to figure out. Okay, what do I have to provide the market that’s going to, people are gonna buy and hopefully be profitable from, right?

Okay, so you get some traction there. People wanna buy your course or your program, cool. Then after that it’s okay how do I increase my profit margin? How do I make this thing kind of work for me? A lot of education companies start off with a really high profit margin because generally what you’re doing is selling, one to many and you’re able to work in a, a situation to where it’s not exactly passive, but it’s more passive than in other places, right?

But then you’re have– You’re faced with this question of okay was it my positioning that, that nailed it, or was it timing that nailed it, or was it a bit, little bit of luck that nailed it? What caused me to be able to have that, that success that I’ve had so far? And so that’s where it comes into okay maybe you’re not entirely clear of how to repeat the process.

And so that’s where the intentionality comes in, is to be able to say, okay, there’s different systems and frameworks that we can put into place in order to make sure that maybe we’re gonna focus on profitability for this section, or maybe we’re working on retention for this section, or maybe we’re working on what our relationships work, work look like.

And all of that comes from basically being strategic and intentional about working on that thing specifically in isolation rather than, “I’m just gonna try a bunch of stuff and kinda hope it works,” which is how we all kinda start off. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah, it’s super easy to get busy and lose your way. 

Craig Shoemaker: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: There’s a lot of we- weeds you can get into, whether that’s some kind of technology rabbit hole, or you start learning about funnels and then you’re building, like, all this stuff.

Or you get really obsessed with the video production or- 

Craig Shoemaker: Yep … 

Chris Badgett: I don’t know. There’s just so many- my- … places to get stuck. 

Craig Shoemaker: Yeah. My my weakness is the fact that I just, I enjoy creating things, right? 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. 

Craig Shoemaker: So I play drums and guitar. I’ve written code for a living. I’ve, books and magazines, podcasts.

It’s I just love the creative process, and so sometimes what I’ll do is oh I wanna make this new lead magnet, or start building this new program, or do this other thing. It’s like no, gotta get back to, okay, what builds the business? So we all fall prey to it. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Shiny object syndrome is a real- Yeah

real thing. Let’s dig in a little bit more on AI. For education entrepreneurs specifically, what are some examples of ways they use AI, or might be using AI poorly versus things that- … tips and tricks you have on c- ways to use it in ways that unlock value? 

Craig Shoemaker: I think the poor ways to use it I th– I, I think the most obvious poor way to use it is also the most enticing.

So spinning up Claude and saying, “Hey, I need you to write my newsletter for me this week because I’m busy.” I’ve done that. I’m not super proud of it, but I’ve totally done it, right? And it’s this seduction of being able to say, “Okay, I know that the system knows about my positioning. I’ve given it, dossiers on all of my key clients.

Here’s my case studies. All of the, you know, here’s stuff that I’ve written before. Here’s all the rules that you’re gonna use to write like me,” right? And you spin something up, and you get… And it’s just it’s 80%. It’s not horrible, but it’s not you, right? And so I think it’s when you build systems and you have a lot of a lot of input that’s gone into it, and then you look for these places to where it’s like the key insight, the thing that really requires the thing that is most of who you are and what you most provide value to your your audiences, and you delegate that off to AI, whether it’s building stuff for your website, writing emails.

Building content that it shouldn’t be doing is, I think, the, the biggest misstep. And so what I like to do is, again, the customer research interviews, or in my case it’s on my coaching calls, is I like to use it more as a research arm for me to where it’s like I don’t try to invent who my ICP is.

I know who my ICP is because I have hundreds of hours of coaching call transcripts that I’ve then gone and asked Claude, say let’s do the pattern matching. Let’s figure it out. What are the things that they face most often? What are the words that they use to be able to describe the the obstacles that they face?”

And so that becomes much more powerful while still keeping me in the driver’s seat of actually running the business. 

Chris Badgett: You have a saying that not all money is good money. Unpack that one, ’cause I totally get that, but I’d love to hear your perspective on it 

Craig Shoemaker: So th- there’s a saying that says passive income doesn’t exist, right?

And that’s totally true. With my courses that I built, though, since I worked with a very strong and very capable publisher in the industry, I would be able to kill myself building a course, record it, publish it, and then be able to collect royalties on it for a long time without really having to y- you know…

I made a quality product, so it didn’t need a lot of updates and do all this kind of stuff. But the thing that got me in the end was the fact that it made me lazy. 

For many years I got the royalty checks and it was great, and I loved it. But what I should have been doing is figuring out, okay, in light of all of the success that I’m having, how do I build something in parallel, like I was saying before, that gives me, th- number one, gives me platform independence, and number two, gives me something long-term?

Because I always knew in the back of my head, I’d tell my wife, I’m like, “This money’s awesome. It’s not gonna last forever. We need to plan. We need to enjoy it while it is,” whatever. And so it was just the fact that, sure, you can make a lot of money doing something very specific, but make sure, one of my favorite words coming back to, is you’re intentional about it.

What are you doing with it? How are you making it into something that will last you long-term? 

Chris Badgett: I think that dovetails into what you were just saying about AI. And by the way, it’s human nature to be lazy or whatever. The brain is… wants you to not work as hard. Oh, yeah. That’s just a thing.

It’s part of the human condition. But if you’re lazy with AI, that’s different from using it as the ultimate research assistant that actually probably makes you work harder, ’cause now you have new insights, and you create more value and stuff like that- 

Craig Shoemaker: Yeah … 

Chris Badgett: in some ways. Let’s talk about lifestyle.

You have five kids. I think you work from home. 

And that’s often… There’s often particularly in the early days of an online business, there’s this friction between family and work. But what have you figured out with five kids, like, how to strike that balance and move forward and be a present father while also, doing, having time for your entrepreneurship and doing what you need to do there?

Craig Shoemaker: Yeah. Oh, man. It’s not easy. I have a la- I have a lam- I don’t have an on air light, but I have a laminated sign that says, “Recording. Don’t open this door unless there’s an emergency.” It’s on 

Chris Badgett: right now? 

Craig Shoemaker: It is on my door right over here, right? 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. 

Craig Shoemaker: And everybody’s old enough that they can read. So- Yeah.

I’ve been working from home for the last 15 years, even longer. So my, my kids have basically grown up with me working at home, and so a lot of it is just been the culture and the nature of what it means to live in this area. But for right now, I literally have a puppy tethered to my chair because I- no one else can watch him right now and I don’t want him to eat all the cords in the house.

So I think it just comes down to having a, an- an understanding of when you need to focus, how can you build boundaries and expectations ahead of time to make sure that happens? And then it’s s- so then once you have all the people around you giving you what you need, then it becomes, okay, how do I focus my mind well enough that I don’t get distracted on social media or, answer emails that I don’t need to at the time or, you know, whatever.

And so it really comes down I think the… Now that I’m articulating it, the, the bottom line is really just self-discipline. What does it look like to be able to say, “I need to have these things in my environment and in my mindset to be able to do what I need to do”? 

Chris Badgett: Yeah, and that goes back to your favorite word, intention.

Craig Shoemaker: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: Like, when you intentionally hold the space or- … intentionally be present at dinner time and stuff like that. 

Craig Shoemaker: Yeah. That 

Chris Badgett: intention is everything, and it’s actually, in my experience, a relief ’cause when you’re trying to do all the things at the same time- 

… 

Chris Badgett: It’s just hard. 

It is.

As I’m talking to you, I saw a voicemail come in from, on my phone from my daughter who’s in the other… i’ve… I like to have a separate workspace, so I’m, like, in a detached garage office, but they’re only three feet away. 

Craig Shoemaker: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: But it’s… she knows that I work, that I’m usually working at this time, and I’ll get to her- Yeah

when I get to her, and if there’s an emergency, the door behind me will open just like your dog will- It 

Craig Shoemaker: has hinge- 

Chris Badgett: hinges. That’s right … do. So life, sometimes you gotta do it. 

Craig Shoemaker: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: Tell us more about how people can work with you. Who’s the perfect fit person- … for your coaching, and what can they do to reach out to you?

And just to add another question on top of that, I know on your website you have something called the Offer Map. If s- … if somebody s- wants to check that out, tell us about those things. 

Craig Shoemaker: Yeah. So that, that was exactly what I was thinking of. So the, the person that I work best with is a education entrepreneur who has a program or a course that they’re selling and wants to figure out how they’re gonna scale and grow from there.

And like I said, that gives… There’s so many different opportunities to go into a business like that and find areas where you can create growth and extra profits that’s i- is worthwhile. Also, going back to one of the first things that we talked about was just having an understanding of what your offer is.

And so if you go over to my website, there’s a link at the top for the Offer Map, and it’s a free tutorial series where I take you through my framework of how I think about building offers. At the end of it, you can get access to a calculator that takes all of the different elements of the Offer Map, and you can plug all that in there, and it gives you an idea of what your revenue might look based off of your audience size, your conversion rates, and each of the different elements of the Offer Map of what that might look like for you.

You just have to provide your email to get to the calculator, but everything, you know, everything’s available for free. On the AI side of things I have some- something that you can get access to, which is basically an assessment that you can take that gives you a sense of where your– I call it your AI gap.

And so as a teacher, as someone who, is– your business is built around education, h- how much can AI do, and where is that, that lane of judgment and le- and of leadership s- remaining for you? And I’ve… That’s an exercise that you can go through. It’s… I’ve seen some wild stuff, right? In, in one, one guy’s situation, we went through and we’re like, “Okay we’re telling Claude teach this this thing about ads.”

And it got it really close, but it wasn’t basically the nuance of the niche that he sells to, right? So it’s not just general ads. He does it specifically for authors who are inde- independent authors trying to sell their books through ads. So some of the procedural stuff it got right, and then it’s another part of the, the system that I take you through is like, okay here’s this really gnarly specific question that someone had that came in as a support email, and it answered that incredibly well, which is not what I had anticipated, right?

I thought that the more relational specific type stuff it was gonna fall down on, and the other stuff it would do better. So it’s just a very revealing exercise to be able to put any AI model I like to use Claude a lot, in your spot and be able to see, okay if someone was just gonna spin up a new chat session, what might they get if they were trying to learn the thing that you do?

And then by seeing those gaps and seeing those edges, that gives you a place to adjust your positioning. 

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Go check it out. That’s at craigshoemaker.net. And if you like podcasts, you’re listening to one now. Craig has a podcast called The Growth Question. Can you tell us what that’s all about?

Craig Shoemaker: Yeah. So The Growth Question is a place where I co-host with my friend John Brosio. And we do similar fashion like this, where we’ll have people come in, but we’ll do live breakdowns. And so they’ll come in and say, “Okay this is an element within my business that’s not working, or I wanna fix, or I wanna grow in.”

And so the two of us together dig into the nitty-gritty of the situation and basically do a, a live coaching session right there on the channel. And so it’s, i- it’s a great way to be able to see us working in real time, and also learn from, some very real similarities that you might have with the guests’ questions that they have.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. So subscribe to The Growth Question podcast, and definitely get- take a visit to craigshoemaker.net. And thank you for being a shining example of a education entrepreneur. As a course creator, somebody who has made courses, made money with courses, maybe put courses on a platform, and whether it was Udemy, Pluralsight, or wherever, and had issues with not owning the platform- 

And wants to get into coaching, Craig’s walked a mile or two in those shoes. So check him out. That’s craigshoemaker.net. Craig, thank you so much for coming on the show. We really appreciate it. 

Craig Shoemaker: Thank you. It’s been a pleasure.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMScast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS.com/gift. Go to LifterLMS.com/gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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According to Chris Badgett, effective LMS and eLearning companies gain valuable clients by serving as strategic business partners rather than just creating websites. Agencies should charge for a systematic discovery process that produces a clear blueprint before any work starts, rather than diving right into development or offering planning for free. He likens it to building a custom home, where no expert begins work without first drafting architectural blueprints. Before investing in a major project, this strategy guarantees that the agency and client are in agreement, minimizes misconceptions, and establishes expectations.

Creating a professional sales process, or what Chris refers to as a sales motion, is one of the episode’s main themes. Agencies should initially qualify new clients using a brief application form before scheduling sales calls or submitting offers. The form should indicate whether the possibility is a good fit for the agency’s specialty, has a reasonable schedule, and has the funds to support the project. Chris proposes that agencies could infer budget by understanding the client’s audience, business size, and present operations rather than directly asking about it. Similarly, the ideal clients are those that have a clear strategy and enough time to carry it out well rather than those who expect a project right now. Chris suggests a two-step dialogue procedure after a lead is qualified.

The first is a quick 15-minute qualifying call that is intended only to verify the details from the application and assess the compatibility of both parties. There ought to be no pressure to close a deal. If the match is good, the customer is asked to a lengthier strategy call where the objective is to sell the paid exploration phase rather than the website project as a whole. The agency emphasizes that careful preparation has genuine value and should be compensated by making this paid discovery its initial offering.

One of the most significant services offered by the agency is the discovery process itself. Chris suggests distributing the process of discovery over three organized sessions. Understanding the client’s long-term vision, pain spots, and company goals is the main purpose of the first session. In the second, potential solutions are mapped out, necessary technologies like CRM connectors, AI, automations, hosting, and LMS features are identified, and any knowledge gaps are filled.

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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.

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. In this episode, I’m gonna help show you how to do sales professionally as an agency building e-learning or online education websites for clients. So if you don’t know who I am, I’m Chris Badgett, CEO and co-founder of LifterLMS, the leading lent- learning management system for WordPress.

And in this episode, we’re gonna dive deep into the agencies and the freelancers that build LMS websites for clients. I actually started as an agency owner, as a freelancer. I’ve been on all sides of this game. You may see me as a software person with LifterLMS, but I’ve built tons of sites for clients and done tons of client sales, and w- I wanna share with you If you build LMS websites for clients, how to do better sales, how to build better projects, and how to get paid what you’re worth.

Now, if you’re listening to this or watching this and you’re not an agency, if you are an e-learning DIY person yourself, it’s really good for you to listen to this so you can see how a professional agency builds a learning management system website, and more than that, an online learning company business.

You’ll get some things out of this, even if you’re not an agency or a freelancer. If you’re thinking about hiring an agency, this will show you how to find a really good agency who actually goes through the process that I’m describing here for things like seeing if you’re a fit for each other, doing a discovery process, and so on.

So the thing I wanna start with you is that what you wanna do as an agency is do not skip over the architect part of the job. This is where you build the plan in the beginning. And what a lot of freelancers and agencies do is they just do that part for free, or they skip it altogether, and then they wonder why the LMS website project goes off the rails.

The client’s not happy, the agency’s not happy, and there’s a bunch of conflict. If you are building a custom home, it’s really important to actually go through the architect or architecture part on the front end. You wouldn’t just say, “Sounds good. Let’s do this. I’ll pay the first invoice,” and then a bunch of people show up on your land with tools and materials to work with no plan at all.

So I’m gonna go into the actual phases and process of sales, which is actually not just sales. It’s not about making money or getting a website project kicked off. It’s about correctly planning and architecting the plan for a successful education company that’s looking to create, launch, and scale online learning on the internet.

So if you’re an agency and you’re doing the blueprint for free or the planning process, that’s not the way to go. You should charge for the plan, not just the build. That’s called a discovery process. We’ll get into that in a little bit. But the plan is a product. It’s actually the first step, so sell it like one.

So- That’s how this works. And I’m gonna give you the operating system to do this. And this isn’t gonna be about marketing, this is gonna be about sales. A lot of people think sales and marketing are the same thing. They’re actually completely different. There is a period when a lead comes in where marketing and sales kind of overlap, but this is gonna be about the sales process, also known as the sales motion

So Back when I was a freelancer, I just wanna say I feel your pain. I think the first website I sold was for about two hundred dollars, and within three to four years the largest website I sold, which included ongoing work, not just the launch of the website, was one hundred thousand dollars per year. And I did that in three to four years, and that was because I discovered

Excuse me, the discovery process I’m gonna teach you today. So this is for projects that are, not the discovery process, but the project is five thousand dollars and up. This is not for freelancers and agencies that do the small builds. So if you wanna get into that kinda middle tier of website projects, this is for you.

There’s eight steps. So we’re gonna talk about the qualification form on your website, the review, the setting call, the strategy call, the discovery process, the proposal, the follow-up on the proposal, getting paid, and the kickoff. So each of these steps costs time, and each of these steps must earn the next move.

This is called sales motion. If you’ve never heard that word, what I’m teaching you is a sales motion for an agency building LMS or e-learning websites for clients. If you’re not in that niche, you’ll still get a lot of value from this, but this is particularly for people that are building in the e-learning industry.

The f- doing it, doing a proposal for free is what most freelancers and agencies do, or they don’t do at all. They’re just like, “Pay me and I’ll get started.” That’s the less experienced way of doing it. So we’re gonna go into how to properly go through the sales motion of doing an e-learning website.

So again, this is not about marketing, this is about sales. So let’s assume we already have some traffic, we already have some people, looking at the services page on our website. Maybe you’re in the LifterLMS Experts program, which is free to join. It’s a free service ’cause people ask us all the time, “Hey, do you know any freelancers or agencies that can help build my LMS website and my online business with me?”

So we refer ’em to the LifterLMS Experts. That’s a free service we provide just to connect people with qualified agencies and freelancers. Let’s talk about where the sales motion really starts. So you have a page on your website, it’s four- Your services. And at the bottom or at the top or both, you’re gonna have a call to action.

So what is the call to action? What a l– the mistake that a lot of people do is they just go straight to book a call through a button in a scheduling link or something, or they send you to a contact form to get started or directly to some kind of priced product that somebody can buy without ever talking to you as a freelancer or agency.

That is the wrong way to do it. So what we wanna do on our first call to action to begin the sales motion is the first part of sales is known as qualification. So what we wanna do on our qualification is start with a form. So a form allows you to automate the qualification first step and get into that.

The step one of the form you don’t wanna ask a million questions in the form. I actually recommend only asking a few things like obviously what’s your name, email, phone number, things like that. But then only ask three qualifying questions, and you’ll have to figure out what these are for you.

But it could be the first one would be, like, relevance or niche or market. If you exclusively build LMS websites, you don’t want a restaurant, wasting your time to build an online website or online ordering system for a restaurant if that’s not what you do. Now, I will say in the early days of freelancing and agency work, I would take any kind of client that came in just ’cause I needed to make money and move forward, and that’s fine if you’re in that phase, you’re in the beginning phases and you’re learning.

But I definitely recommend niching your agency to a p-particular niche. If you’re in this community and you’re listening to this podcast, I definitely recommend just making sure they’re somehow related to education doing courses, memberships. Maybe it’s a company that needs internal training for their team members and so on.

That is what you’re trying to get in question one. In question two, we wanna find their budget. And just a pro tip here, you can’t ask people, “Hey, how much are you looking to spend?” or “How much are you able or willing to pay?” That is the wrong question. It’s too direct. You have to earn trust before you get there.

But you can ask in a sideways way to figure out- like what kind of budget they have. So certain questions you can ask are things like, “What’s your team size?” So if you know somebody has three, four, five, 10, 100 team members, you know that’s a company that has some kind of budget. Who are their learners?

Or who are they serving? So if they’re cerni- serving a market that has a lot of money, like CEOs or governments or whatever, it doesn’t mean it has to be high-ticket courses or anything like that, but you can figure out their budget based on what they’re doing. I like to try to figure out if they’re already getting paid for what they do.

Maybe they’re doing the education in person and they’re looking to automate, and so on. But there’s different ways to ask about the budget without asking them directly about the money itself. The third thing I like to ask is their desired timeline. What I’m trying to find is the urgency for the project and to see how important it is to them.

Now, there’s a lot of different things they could answer here, and the first answer is counterintuitive, not what you want. If somebody’s already in an emergency and they’re like, “I need this tomorrow,” or, “I need this, next week,” they’re already behind the eight ball and they’re not– they’re in too much of an emergency situation that it’s gonna break your process, and those aren’t the best clients.

So if they’re in a big hurry, if they’re an urgent lead, those are usually the weaker leads. And whenever you get somebody like that’s not qualified, I would recommend just building other people or other agencies you could refer them to. I call it throwing a bone. So even if you can’t help them, you can still direct them to somebody who might be able to help them.

And then maybe that partner that you refer business to also refers business to you when they have somebody who’s a better fit for you instead of them. So always try to help people even if they don’t make it through the initial qualification the other timeline thing, the, the sweet spot is somebody where what they’re doing is a priority to them, but they’re not in an emergency situation.

So there’s a saying we have from the agency world, which is, “Your lack of planning is not my emergency.” I know that sounds rough. I wouldn’t say that to a client per se, but what you want is somebody who’s proactive, they’ve got a plan, they’re looking at the next quarter. You potentially have one, two, three, four months to actually work together and develop an awesome project together.

Those are the ones you want. And on the other side we have what we call people that are just dreaming. They’re like, “I’m not sure. It’s just an idea I have. I’m just exploring options,” which is fine if that’s in- the state they’re in, but those aren’t the best clients ’cause they don’t really have a plan.

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In sales, we call those tire kickers which comes from car sales. They’re not really interested in buying. And it’s fine. This is why that form is there. So if you see somebody who’s like– If you ask in your form “What’s your priority and timeline?” And they’re like, “I don’t really have one. I have…

It’s kind of low priority. It’s just an idea I was exploring,” then I might refer that person to some other marketing resources I have or other things without moving right into the sales process So the best client has at least a month of runway and a real plan. They’ve already prioritized. They’re in motion on a plan that they have.

So in terms of the form, you can use any kind of form tool in WordPress, like Gravity Forms, WS Form, Ninja Forms, WP Form, Formidable Forms, and so on. That’s what I would use on your website to build that kind of qualification form on your website. And just a pro tip for you, when you get these emails, you can actually integrate AI to help with what’s known as lead scoring, which is just a fancy way of saying okay, based on how they answered this form, this is a hot lead, this is a warm lead, this is a lead that’s not relevant to us or, h- has a lower score.

We might refer them out to another agency or other resources and so on. So the next stage after we get through the form, let’s say they’re qualified, everything looks good, they’re in the right niche, their timeline is good, and they have … It appears as though they have budget. You could also do it yourself or use AI to look at the client’s company and business and learn a bunch of things about them through their online presence.

So if they’re qualified, the next step in sales is to move to a two-step process. The f- next step is what I call the 15-minute setting call So in sales, there’s setting and closing. So we’re setting up the lead, and then we’re qu- qualifying them now, not through a form, but through a conversation, and then we’ll move into a closing call in the next step.

But while we’re on the setting call, it’s w- it’s one job to do, which is for a human to, to do, which is to confirm in person what the form claimed. You’re basically moving past the form and continuing to qualify to make sure that the niche is good, the timeline’s good, the budget’s good, and that it looks like not just that the client’s a good fit for you, but that you are a good fit for the client.

So I’m a big fan of non-pushy sales, so every step in this process, it’s a win-win for everybody. It’s not high-pressure sales. At this stage, we’re just trying to make sure we’re a good fit for each other. So the setting call is a 15-minute call. It’s relationship building. It’s getting to know each other a little bit.

It’s confirming their answers on the form are accurate, maybe probing for some more information, giving the client opportunity to ask you questions to make sure that you’re a fit for them. And then what you do here in setting is we’re still qualifying, so to remove the high-pressure sales aspect if they’re qualified is to not try to close them on that call.

So you can open the call by saying something like, “We’re not gonna … I have nothing to sell you today. I’m just trying to make sure we’re a good fit for each other, learn a little bit more about your business and your goals with your e-learning website.” After that call, if they’re a fit, what I would do is say, “After I get on- off this call with you, I’m gonna send you a link to schedule a strategy call,” which is actually a closing call.

We’re not doing a magic trick or any kind of sleight of hand here. We’re just removing the pressure of “Hey, there’s nothing to buy right now. Sounds like we’re a good fit for each other. I’m gonna send you an email right after we get off the phone with the next step.” If they’re not qualified, what we’re gonna do here on the call or after the call is say “Hey, it sounds like we’re not quite the right fit.

I don’t really work in that niche,” or, “My agency doesn’t really work with the timeline that you need,” or whatever the, the reason is. But then we can throw them a bone here and either do it on the call or after the call in a follow-up email, refer them to some other agency or other resources. But if they are a fit, as soon as you get off the call, we’re gonna send them a booking link to book the 30-minute strategy call.

So that’s moving on to the next step, which is step three, which is the closing call, which is also known in public speak as the strategy call. ‘Cause most people don’t like to show up. Nobody wants to be closed. Everybody loves to buy, but nobody loves to be sold to. And we, I like to call this a strategy call because it’s not it’s not just a sales call.

It’s we’re gonna do some strategy together and draw some insight and ideas. They’re gonna get benefit from it, even if they don’t close or become an agency client for you So now that we’re on the sales call, this is the real sales call, and you’re not just selling a website, you’re selling the solution to what they want for their business.

It’s outcome-focused. So basically, the frame to hold here is that, we’re qualified for each other, we’re a good fit for each other, here’s the next step. So this is where we move from selling the paid discovery. Now, in sales, there’s this idea of holding the frame, and what I mean by that is you should be process-driven.

And I’m literally giving you the process here to hold and to execute on. ‘Cause if you just show up to these calls and you don’t really have a process or guide the client sometimes they’re just gonna take over the call and start, going in tangents, which is fine, but that’s not what you want.

If you have a solid sales motion, you have a process and a choreography that you follow when you do your sales. So the next step is to sell the paid discovery. We’re not even selling the big project yet. We’re just selling the … as an architect, the idea and the plan that we’re gonna do the architecture work and build the plan for the work that we’re gonna do together.

So the build is not for sale yet. We’re selling the plan, and the benefit is that every detail is hashed out so that the client can move forward with more speed, certainty, and insight. In terms of the paid discovery this is where, this is the holding the frame part where you explain what that is, and you can use that metaphor of building a custom home and how it’s very important that there’s a plan in place before all the workers and materials show up to get started.

That’s part of the product, that’s part of the service that you offer in terms of being a web or online business or e-learning business architect. So if some people push back on this idea of putting a plan together, there’s several objection handling that you can do here. One of them is that just explaining matter-of-factly that this is how professionals work.

It’s not posture, it’s not an argument, it’s just holding the frame on your process, being like, “Look, we can’t move forward without a plan together. We need to know what the plan is before we can price the plan.” And then the main thing that closes the sale of the discovery process is letting them know that, “Hey, no matter what…

Hey, this plan is yours. You paid for it. It’s a work product, it’s a deliverable. You can decide to work with me to implement the plan after that, or you can find… You can take this plan, this document, which is yours, that you own, and you can move forward with that with whoever you like.” And this is really what closes the sale.

Most clients that really understand the value of a plan and having a blueprint before actually moving into construction will totally get it, they’ll totally value it. So if they agree to move forward from there, now we’re moving into paid discovery. What we do here is we need to send them an invoice for the paid discovery.

Now, you might be asking, “How much should I charge for a paid discovery for this kind of online business and website build?” There’s a lot of options here, but this isn’t gonna work for low-value clients, in the hundreds of dollars or the lower thousands price points. But as a minimum, what I would recommend is $1,000 minimum for a minimum $5,000 website project.

Again, you could be getting into a 20,000, a 30,000, a 50,000 or even more website project, but it really needs to match the, it needs to, line up and be like a small piece of the bigger project, but you should not be giving it away for free. So it’s a separate deliverable, it’s not a deposit.

And one pro tip here you can do is you can let them know if they decide to move forward with your discovery, that you will deduct that as a discount on the actual project. You can do that. I’ve done that in the past, and it works well. It removes the risk. And again, they can always take that and, do the actual implementation once they have the plan with somebody else if for whatever reason they want to.

In my experience, I’ve never had somebody not move forward after the paid discovery with us, but it puts the client at ease, and it’s always there. If it’s not a fit, if you or them didn’t enjoy working with each other during the architecture and discovery process, you can always pass that to somebody else, and they can move forward.

Once we get through the discovery process what we’re doing here in actually jumping into the discovery process is I recommend doing like three calls on a weekly cadence. So I’m a big fan with working with clients, with getting things in the calendar and having them on the same time, same day, and then you can develop a rhythm and a cadence together.

So there’s three parts o- of a discovery process. So let’s say you’re gonna work with a client through a discovery process for three weeks, every Tuesday at 1:00 PM. You set that up, you send them the calendar invite after they paid the invoice, whether it was a $1,000 discovery, a $5,000 dis- discovery, or even a $10,000 discovery for a large project.

So the first call is about going deeper from the strategy call, which is where you’re getting into a deeper dive into, to their pains and their goals. Remember, in the qualification call and the closing call, there’s only so much time we have to get into the nitty-gritty details. But call number one, I like to do hour-long discovery calls, three of them.

We’re really digging into their pains and goals, and we’re also digging into your capabilities as a freelancer or agency. Remember, this is always like a two-way process, but you’re holding the frame on the cadence and the process so the client can relax and feel comfortable that you’ve done this before and you- you’re asking the right questions, they’re free to ask questions to you, and so on.

So you’re getting the information you need to basically get to the point where you can construct a detailed proposal. But you don’t have to do it all in call one. Call one is more of a mind meld to really sync up as an agency and a client together about your capabilities and their pain points, goals, and the opportunities that they’re chasing Call two, we’re starting to work towards the proposal more.

We’re filling in gaps. Maybe there’s more information gathering after we’ve got out the call, after we’ve discussed, and more ideas have emerged. We start mapping towards solutions, and we’re setting expectations on how the process works. We’re giving the client ideas about what we see as priorities.

They’re telling us what they see as priorities. ‘Cause remember, clients don’t necessarily know exactly what they want, so we’re trying to flesh all that out, and you don’t necessarily know exactly what the client needs. So we’re mapping all that out, but ultimately with the eye of getting to a specific proposal with- which is in your capabilities.

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So in terms of solution mapping, what I’m talking about is, all right, we need a website. Are we working on an existing website? Are we doing CRM integration? Are we bringing in other tools? Are we bringing in artificial intelligence for something? Are we building in automations? Are we gonna be doing the web hosting?

Is somebody else gonna be doing the web hosting? And so on. So we’re getting everything we need on call two, so that we can put together an effective proposal with all the information that we need So after call two, you take everything you’ve done so far and you actually put together the proposal. And a proposal includes things like timelines, phases, costs, and whether you’re doing project-based pricing, I’ve got some pro tips for you on that in a little bit, versus hourly and so on.

And remember, here’s where you can throw in on this third call you’re presenting your proposal. So you’re actually coming back together for a third time in the discovery process now that you’ve, discovered everything and you have your proposal. It goes through phases. One thing I like to do here is if a project sounds really big, maybe this first proposal is just for phase one, like just the website.

And if they want– if you have like marketing and sales capabilities that you can offer as well, maybe that comes in phase two, and we’re just gonna table that and not even look at that. ‘Cause sometimes clients wanna pack, especially entrepreneur clients, which I can relate to, they wanna pack in this grand vision over years and everything.

But maybe you’re driving towards a proposal for phase one, which is just getting the website launched, courses set up, and all of that. And maybe you do instructional design and help with course development and all of that. It just depends on your capabilities So in call three, we basically are presenting the proposal.

We’re screen sharing, we’re looking at the proposal document. Again, we’re not doing high-pressure sales, so at the end of the call, we’re gonna send them the proposal after we get off the phone and encourage them to m- make the purchase and move forward with whatever phase one is. Maybe it’s the entire project, or maybe it’s like a, a phase one, and move forward from there.

But we’re not gonna do the high-pressure sales and ask them to pull out their credit card or whatever on the call. We’re just presenting the solution. We’re letting them know cost and timelines, phases, milestones, deliverables that you’re gonna deliver, deliverables they need to deliver, like course content or logins to certain things so that you can do your work, and so on.

And so that completes the discovery process. You’ve given them the proposal. They can take that, they could shop it to another company, but if you’re at this point and you’ve done a good job, it’s 90% guaranteed that they’re gonna move forward with you now that you, as an architect, have given them the blueprint, the cost, and the timeline and all of that.

But they keep the plan no matter what. And most are gonna stay with you. So just to dive into some pro tips on the actual proposal itself, you’ve got timelines, you’ve got milestones. Maybe you’re doing things in phases. Maybe you’re putting all the phases in the proposal. Maybe you’re just focusing on phase one.

It just depends on you and what the client needs. You’ve got all of the deliverables and the costs there and it basically confirms what the discovery has already shown and agreed to. If there’s surprises, it means the discovery failed. You didn’t find the information or explain enough what you do and how you do it, how much it costs and how long it takes.

So- one pro tip here is to phase the money. I’m a big fan of… And remember, we’re not doing high-pressure sales. We’re removing risk and pressure constantly. So the simple way to phase the money is 50% upfront, 100, and the rest, the other 50% on completion. But for bigger projects, you might chop it up into three milestone payments or maybe four and so on if we’re working over many months.

And it’s a lot easier for a client to get started, let’s say, on a $50,000 project for 10 grand, and ultimately they pay as you deliver milestones, every couple weeks or month and so on. So that way they’re comfortable. You’ve reversed the risk, so if they’re not happy with the first milestone, they could choose to back out, and you’re also still getting paid for that first part you did.

So I’m a big fan of phasing the money, and if you really believe in the quality of your work, there’s no reason not to do that to make your client’s life easier and earn their respect and trust. And let’s say you work with that client again later on another project or on the same project. Once you’ve worked together, you may be able to switch to a different model where you do half upfront and half up at the end or whatever.

So that’s how you do that. I’m gonna give you a pro tip here on how to price it. So- I wouldn’t just present one number for the whole thing. Show the total, but show the different deliverables that add up to that total. So a simple example would be first step, we’re gonna build a website.

That’s $10,000. Then we’re gonna do all the learning management system stuff, and that includes this many courses, this many quizzes, this many memberships, e-commerce integration, and all the things you do. That’s the second step. Then the third step is marketing automation, CRM integration, and so on, and each of those deliverables has a different cost.

So that’s the way to do it. In terms of pricing, I learned a pro tip when you’re looking at a deliverable, and you can look at the actual individual deliverables that roll up into a milestone, and the milestone has a number on it, and it’s up to you whether you wanna put money beside each deliverable or just the milestone.

But it’s important not just to give them one number for the end. But this is a trip- trick I learned from Chris Lima for pricing. I’m a big fan of project-based pricing instead of hourly work, so you’re pricing based on value versus time, which I’m a big fan of. And the way I decide, if I find a client I really wanna work with, and we just can’t quite really discover with a lot of clarity, and we really need to just get into it, the client has pr- plenty of budget, I trust that they’re gonna be around and be respectful of my time, I’m gonna be respectful of their time, I may go hourly and present an hourly rate with hours estimates.

But I’m a bigger fan of doing milestone-based, fixed price, project-based pricing. So the trick I learned from Chris Lema, you can do this in a spreadsheet as you’re looking at the deliverables that roll up into the milestone, is when you look at something specific, let’s say install and configure all the LifterLMS components based on what the client needs, there would be three columns in the spreadsheet for that each deliverable.

So column one is the least amount of money I would take for this work. Column two is the average price that, I feel comfortable with for this work. And then the, the third column is the amount that is super valuable to the client. Client has good budget, this is what this deliverable is worth.

If they’re really paying, not top dollar, like you’re ripping them off or something like that, but like, when you’re like, “Yeah, this is really worth this in a perfect scenario.” And so you have these three different numbers. The low number, the average number, and the high number. And then what you do is you do a scoring across those, where the low number is worth one point, the average number is worth three points, and then the big number is worth one point, and you average that out.

And what that does is, let’s say it takes you a s- much longer than you thought it would take, and that’s on you for not knowing how long something would take you. You may end up at the low number. Let’s say it does exactly what we think it’s gonna do, and we’re happy with it. You’re gonna end up at the average number.

Let’s say it actually goes quicker and everything turned out amazing. You’re gonna end up at the high number. So across all the deliverables, when you’re coming up with your pricing for a value-based price project, I find that super helpful. Now, that way of pricing, value-based pricing, is in for internal purposes only.

That’s for you. It’s not for the client to see. It’s just you as a business owner figuring out your deliverable and ultimately milestone pricing, and that all kind of rolls up into the total project price the next thing we wanna get into, you’ve finished the discovery process, you’ve gone over your proposal, they’ve seen the timelines and the pricing and everything.

And again, we’re gonna remove high-pressure sales and just present the proposal, give them the PDF, and then let them know we’d like to move forward, and they have basically a yes/no answer to decide to work with you or not. And they need to know that once they say yes, then you can put them on the production schedule.

But, like, when this project start is dependent on their confirmation that they’re ready to move forward with you or not. And again, I don’t like to pressure them on the call. After I get off that third discovery call, they’ve got the proposal, I’ll send an immediate follow-up email. There’s a saying, “The fortune is in the follow-up in sales.”

So it’s all about following up. Remember, we’re going through a choreography, a sales motion, and a process here. So in the follow-up, I’d be like, “Hey, it’s great to work for you,” or, “Great to work with you. I hope you enjoyed the discovery process. I had a lot of fun. It’s awesome getting to know your business.

I’m confident I can help you, and I feel really confident about our proposal. Let me know if you’d like to move forward so I can get you on the calendar. I’ll send the invoice, and once that’s paid, we’ll get started and get rolling.” So that’s the main follow-up, and most of them, if they’re gonna close, should close pretty fast, like even the same day or within a week.

If they don’t respond, I would do a couple more follow-ups. So follow-up two would just be like, “Hey, just checking in. I really enjoyed the discovery process.” And just reinforce what you said about getting on the production schedule and moving forward with the kickoff call, which we’ll talk about in a second.

And then the third, I might follow up a week later and be like, “Hey, it’s been a week.” Maybe they have to consult with other stakeholders or a business partner or spouse or something like that. But just check in and be like, reinforce the value again, let them know you’d love to work with them, remind them about the getting on the production schedule and let them know if they’re ready, if they’re ready to roll that you can send the invoice and get on the calendar and move forward.

And through those three follow-ups, you’re highly likely to close that sale. If it– If they’re like, “No, thanks,” you could always throw them the bone again, maybe refer another agency or send them more resources and information so that’s the last part of the sales motion in terms of the discovery process.

And now, just like we were talking about sales, we’re not really talking about marketing, and we’re not really talking about implementation, but there’s these gray areas right between sales and marketing and then sales and customer success. So customer success, I mean moving forward with the project.

They paid invoice number one, and they’re ready to roll. So one of the reasons they hired you is because you’re being a good communicator. You’re getting on the phone or the Zoom or w- meeting, online meeting with them. You’re adding value. So what I like to do is actually, especially for, mid-market projects, these are like 10, 20, $30,000 builds I like to do a weekly call with the client.

Now, this works with solopreneurs and agencies. If you’re a solopreneur, it’s just you. You’re doing all these steps. If you have an agency, there’s a project manager perhaps. They’ve paid, they’re moving forward with phase one, and everything is moving forward. So the kickoff call, they pay the invoice.

What the client wants to see is fast action, and you have to be honest about your capacity. Maybe you’re really booked out and you can’t do that kickoff call until a month later or even two months later, and that’s fine. But if you’re not busy and you’re ready to roll… And remember, you’re incentivized to roll and build this project so that you can get the future payments or the la- all the way to the last payment and so on.

You’ve already built a rhythm, let’s say meeting at, on Tuesdays at 1:00 PM or whatever. So you do a kickoff call, and on this call, the salesperson and the project manager, if they’re different people, and maybe there’s developers and designers and other people will come to that call, that is the kickoff.

That is the handoff from sales to implementation. And if it’s just you as a solopreneur, you can still do all this. And then you get on a weekly rhythm where you’re providing updates, you’re removing bottlenecks, or if you need things from the client, if you have questions for the client. You always have this weekly touch point to accelerate ’cause everybody gets really busy with emails and business and life and all the rest.

So this is a partnership, and you’re valuing that partnership. You’re holding space for each other and moving forward. So- That is the sales motion and how to do paid discovery. If you have any questions about that process or any questions about how much should I charge for this?” or, “What do you recommend if the client says that?”

Just reach out to us, let us know. It’s … Again, it’s about building a partnership. It’s not about closing sales or pressuring clients or trying to get the most money you can for the least amount of effort. That’s the wrong mindset. The correct mindset is, how can I add more value than anybody else to this type of client through my agency work?

Where I feel like I’m earning a respectful income, I’m getting paid the work that I’m doing as a freelancer in an agency, and I’m super happy with it. I enjoy working with this client, and the client feels like, “Oh my gosh, I can’t believe how much value I’m getting.” Ideally you want to end up in the 10X value range.

So what I mean by that is, let’s say you charge $30,000 to help an a in-person training company move online, and in their first year w- after you’ve launched, they’ve made $300,000 with their online training business that they paid you 30,000 for. That’s 10X value. And let’s say you’re really happy with the $30,000 and the amount of time that required you to work on, and th- there’s good profit there and stuff for you.

That’s where we’re going. That’s how this process works. Make each step flow into the next and get paid for your thinking. Never try to build a house without a plan. Hold the frame. Lay out your process. One of my favorite things to do, whether it’s the setting call, the closing call, discovery call one, two, three, I always open the call with something like

First I just break the ice and make the human connection, but then I’m like, as I’m rolling into the work, I’m holding the frame by saying, “Awesome. Let’s jump r- right into it. I’ll set the time expectation. We have an hour for this call. The way this call works is XYZ. The purpose of this call is to, XYZ.”

I- it could … If you’re on call one, it’s to, “For me to get all the information I need to build the proposal that you’re gonna get in call three. It’s also an opportunity for you to explore deeper into our capabilities and everything.” So that’s how you hold the frame and just deliver value. It’s not about being in control or dominating the client, it’s about the choreography so that the client can relax, so that you can relax, and that you guys can create the most value for each other.

Now, if you’re hiring an agency and you want high-quality work, there’s many different ways to do this kind of sales motion, but you should experience something similar to what I’m talking about here. And the best thing about a great agency-client relationship is it’s a relationship. It builds over time.

And in sales, I call it land and expand, where, all right we did a 2,000 or $3,000 discovery process, and then that expands into a $20,000 website build, then that expands into a maintenance package, hosting, future projects, a completely different other project. The client refers you to their friends. So it’s all about landing and expanding and really developing a high-quality business relationship and a brand and a reputation in your industry as a high-value agency in the e-learning niche.

And also, just last thing for you is, remember, clients aren’t hiring you to just build a website. They may think that’s what they want, and that’s kind of a commodity in a sense. It’s like a website, it does X, Y, and Z. But what you’ll find as a high-quality agency or freelancer is that you’re actually delivering business consulting.

Maybe you do other things besides the website, like marketing services, instructional design, AI implementation, and you’re really becoming an integrated part of this client’s business. And even friendships and things can emerge from these kinds of things when they’re done well. So that’s it for the, this episode.

That is the agency sales process between five and even six-figure website clients in the e-learning niche for courses, memberships, training-based membership sites for any reason. I’m Chris from LifterLMS. I hope you enjoyed this episode, and we will catch you in the next one. Take care.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMScast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS.com/gift. Go to LifterLMS.com/gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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Chris Badgett and Steve Woody from WP Fusion have an uplifting discussion about entrepreneurship, the strength of the WordPress community, artificial intelligence, personal growth, and creating a meaningful online company in this episode of LMScast.

Steve talks about his amazing path from web developer and agency owner to bestselling book, business adviser, and first WP Fusion contributor. He considers how moving outside of his comfort zone and actively participating in the WordPress community profoundly changed his personal and professional life.

Chris and Steve talk about how networking at WordPress events like WordCamp and PressConf, building genuine relationships, and surrounding oneself with growth-minded individuals may open doors to possibilities that technology alone can’t.

The quick development of artificial intelligence and its implications for online company owners, entrepreneurs, and course designers are also discussed. Steve emphasizes that critical thinking, creativity, purpose, and human connection are still vital while outlining how AI may be utilized to automate tedious activities, increase productivity, and improve consumer experiences rather than seeing it as a threat. Chris and Steve delve further into the significance of sustaining a growth mindset, conquering a fear of change, and consistently picking up new skills in a constantly changing digital environment.

They also provide helpful tips for breaking out from the “downward spiral” by emphasizing physical well-being, developing a positive outlook, creating communities of support, accepting discomfort, and concentrating on providing value before anticipating outcomes. This episode provides insightful advice on developing resilience, discovering purpose, and achieving long-term success in both business and life, whether you’re a WordPress expert, online instructor, entrepreneur, or someone seeking inspiration to advance both personally and professionally.

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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. His name is Steve Woody. I’m gonna start with a story about how I met Steve, and then what transpired over the next week, but first, welcome to the show, Steve 

Steve Woody: Hey, Chris. Thank you so much for having me. Appreciate you being here.

Chris Badgett: It’s awesome to reconnect with you. And just to tell the story how I met Steve is I went to a membership site owner conference in the UK called Retain that’s put on by Mike Morrison over at the Membership Geeks. And I was at the hotel bar with Jack Arturo from WP Fusion, and he was like, “My friend Steve’s coming,” and he told me a little bit about Steve, and it’s like really late at night at this point, I think it might be 11:00 PM.

And Jack and I t- tech folks are, like, sitting there, and here comes Steve. He was the nicest dressed guy in the whole hotel. And we just hit it off. We started talking, and then multiple nights, we’d be down there in the hotel bar talking until it closed down, nobody’s around.

Staff is walking around, giving us the eye to go to bed or whatever. But we just hit it up. We had a great conference together. We did a s- seven mile, I think, run together, and visited, like- 20. 

Steve Woody: Felt, definitely felt like 20. 

Chris Badgett: We did, like, all the bridges on the river there. It was awesome.

But the first night I met Steve he just randomly bought me a train ticket ’cause I needed to get to London from Newcastle, and I’ve been in Europe, I’ve been on trains before, but it had been like 20 years, and Steve just greased the whole thing. I had a personal guide. I got a black car in London with Steve, which is iconic.

Some good fish- Fish 

Steve Woody: and chips. Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: And, Good day … and then we there was another conference I went to, another after party, meals and whatnot, but it’s really fun. This, this episode is gonna be about community, which is really interesting in this modern world with tech, AI, remote work, location-independent businesses.

Community is really important, but one of the coolest things about community, and I would say community changed my life, and it’s because it’s real human beings that you meet. I call it finding the others. ‘Cause you may have, your unique quirks, but then you end up in some random country with finding a good friend that you’ve never met before, and you’re into a lot of the same stuff, but what, tell, what did I miss, Steve? It was a fun week. 

Steve Woody: It- 

Chris Badgett: Yeah, 

Steve Woody: what else happened? It was an incredible week. It was so interesting. Okay I’ll give a little bit of a backstory before Retain because it’s quite interesting my journey and how I got into this space. And thank you by the way for that introduction.

That was very humbling. I’m blessed to know you and you’re a great guy and I just- I you’ve absolutely hit the nail on the head. It’s the connection. Everything to me is about the connection. Yeah, okay, we can sell products. Yeah, okay, we can look at the business and the strategy, but at the end of the day, why are we doing what we’re doing?

Why are we here? We’re here ’cause we wanna make a difference, we wanna make an impact, we wanna have value, but we really wanna connect with people. And I believe in that tribal mentality, and so WordPress is a very interesting tribe for me. And when I started on websites, we’re talking a couple of decades ago now I started in HTML.

HTML sort of progressed into PHP, bit of CSS on the side, and then I saw this guy who I knew who was making a lot… He’s making seven figures. He was doing really well as a web- as a website builder, and he was just churning out websites. And I’m sitting there, one pixel to the left, one pixel to the right, doing these sites and really meticulously taking care over the code to make sure it was commented out, it was written well.

So my biggest fear was another developer. It wasn’t the client, it wasn’t the customer. It was another developer looking at my code. And so what happened was I realized that this guy was using this template builder or this CMS called WordPress, and I’m humble, I’m man enough to admit when I make a mistake, but I hated WordPress.

Like I told everyone, “If you use WordPress, you’re cheating. If you use WordPress, you’re not a proper developer. If you…” All of the stuff that we hear o- over and over with whatever industry, that was me. And I’m sitting there in my pants eating cold pizza, looking at this guy making seven figures, and I said, “Look, I may not agree with him, but he’s doing something I’m not.”

And so I had to make some radical changes, and I got into WordPress, and I started to use it. But I never engaged with the community physically. And so for a decade, I used WordPress. And I wanted to contribute, I wanted to get involved, but I never felt like I was good enough. I never felt like I was of a level or a caliber where I could give back.

And so for me, I used the product, which is what everyone normally does. They start by using. But I did an agency, had designers, developers that were working, building websites for clients, and I went more down the funnel route as, as opposed to the website route itself, and I was more interested in sales funnel, internet marketing.

Around the time a good friend of mine, Russell Brunson, was launching a product called ClickFunnels, and so around that time when that was launching, I pushed into that whole market. And it was around the same time that freelancing was becoming more popular. And what I found is that I live in…

lived in London at the time, in the UK. I had an office in Central London, and I started to see these freelancers that were building on WordPress in India and in the Philippines, and they were just churning out sites, and they were doing it cheap. And I couldn’t… I had rent to pay. I couldn’t afford to be that cheap.

So I had to make a pivot, and this was around 2014, that I decided I was gonna stop building websites, and I decided to write a book. And so I actually wrote a book called Plan Your Website, and it did really well. Became an international bestseller sold the rights to Saudi Arabia. It was used for over a decade in universities.

I ended up building websites for Harvard, and so I really got to expand my my circle and move more from a a website developer and agency owner into more of a a consultant, into a consulting role for business owners. And then I just stopped building ’cause I was just consulting, and so I was giving people a plan, and then they were going to the developers to get the job built.

So fast-forward to today, and the re- and the reason that we met was because of, as you mentioned, Jackultoro. So about- 12, 13 years ago now, I hired Jack from a, from one of these outsourcing websites, and I know enough code to be dangerous. I can get myself into trouble, but I don’t know how to get myself back out.

I’m… That’s my level. And so I stopped coding. I stopped learning code. I never learned script- I never learned to Python or JavaScript or anything. I never bothered. And I needed because I was using a CRM at the time, and to me, it was In- Infusionsoft was the only real product on the marketplace. You had Salesforce, but that was enterprise.

So for the, for a typical business owner, for a small startup or a one-man band, Infusionsoft was the product that pe- that people were using. And I needed a way to connect Infusionsoft into WordPress. And so I think at the start we piggybacked it onto S2Member. I think it was… We used another plugin and Jack, I hired him to come on board, and he made this connection to connect the the CRM to the website, so that if people updated their details in a form, it would update the CRM.

If I updated the CRM, it would update their account area. And then what happened after that is Jack was like, this is cool.” I’d hired him. He’d given me the code. But he said I think I could turn this into a product. I think I can make this something.” And so as a result, he he said “Do you mind if I take this code?”

And I was like, “Sure. Just look after me, and let’s keep me involved, and we’ll… Let’s see what we can do.” And he we… we created WP Fusion. And I say we. At the time, it was us, but I have to give full and absolute credit to Jack because at that time, I had some personal stuff going on in my life, so I had to step back.

And as a result, Jack spent the next decade building this incredible plugin, and initially, it was just for Infusionsoft, and then I would phone Jack up and be like, “Hey, Jack, some of my clients have just moved over to ActiveCampaign. Can you hook it up?” And, “Hey, Jack, some of my clients have just moved over to Zoho.”

And that’s why now it’s like Jack was like, “Okay, I’m just gonna… I’m just gonna preempt that Steve’s gonna need all these CRMs,” and so he just connected them all up. But yeah it’s evolved, and he has spent 10 years building nothing but sanity metrics within that company. He’s done no vanity. He’s done no marketing.

And the 15,000 users are a testament to Jack. They are Jack. I can’t take credit for that. I wasn’t involved in that part of it. And so fast forward to about a year ago, and I was going through a, a relationship breakup and considering what my life was gonna look like mo- moving forward.

And Jack said, “Come over to Berlin. Let’s just get you out of your environment and sort your head out.” And we, we’d stayed friends the whole time. So I went over to Berlin and it was interesting because me and Jack both work nights, as many developers and many people do. And when I flew out there, for s- for whatever reason, my body clock had adjusted to daytime, but Jack was still on nights.

And I didn’t have Jack’s Wi-Fi password, and he’d gone to bed, and I was literally sitting in his front room for about seven hours, and I had nothing to do. I had no phone. I had no laptop. And it forced me to just uncomfortably sit on his balcony and in his front room and just process my life, which at that time I really needed to do.

And I I come away from that weekend, and Jack said, “Why don’t you come back into WP Fusion?” He’s like, “Why don’t you come back and if you’re looking for something to do, I’d” Long story short I pivoted out of websites during COVID. I moved into crypto. I went through crypto made e- enough money that I didn’t need to work at the time, but I lost my self-worth.

I lost my I, I lost my my passion, and I love building. I love building things. And so Jack kinda guided me and helped me get back into that space, and he said, “Hey, we’re going to an event in Newcastle. It’s called Retain. Why don’t you come with us?” And yeah, that brings us up to where… And that was the, that was tail end of the year before I met you, and then, yeah we met and that’s just the start of the story.

There’s so much more that’s happened it’s insane. This year’s been just unreal, unbelievable. But yeah, that, that kinda- Let’s- … brings us up, so yeah … 

Chris Badgett: let’s talk about the power of community. Like in WordPress as an example I would say a very small percentage, single digits actually get involved in the community, and that’s not just WordCamps.

That’s other niche events like PressConf or other marketing conferences or the thing that we went to in Retain. And for me it’s literally changed my life. My current business partner I met at a small conference. My lead developer I met at a, a small conference. A lot of the people that are, have been most impactful in my entrepreneurship gener- journey, there has been an in-person element.

And you don’t know what you’re missing unt- I think until you see the value. I was just like you, an, a freelancer, agency guy building sites. Yes, I used WordPress and all the, and Infusionsoft and all these other tools, I went to like the Infusionsoft conference and then started going to these WordPress events, and quickly e- everything just changes when you kinda have that people side view of what’s going on.

So I’m really curious to ask you, Steve, recently you went to PressConf, a great event and- Yeah … but I really wanna get your perspective of you’re, you had all these chapters in your life. You’re a book author, agency owner. You didn’t even mention it, but you worked with Tony Robbins for a while and- Anyways, you kinda plugged back in to this entrepreneur digital course, coaching, information product industry, and started going to some events like the one we met at called Retain.

But I’d be curious to get your read as somebody kinda reentering the WordPress community, if you will what you noticed at PressConf, and what are some things that you noticed there? 

Steve Woody: Yeah, that’s a brilliant question because just before I went out to Berlin with Jack, I was actually teaching at a university in London, and so I was…

I’d gone from being quite isolated ’cause I went through a period where I wasn’t working. I was… I just didn’t, I just didn’t need to. And the thing is I’ve spent my whole life struggling financially, so I’ve always had that that chasing the carrot, that next paycheck, that making sure I can survive.

And so when that was no longer a thing, it re- everyone thinks you wanna sit on a beach and retire until you actually don’t have anything to do, and then you realize actually it’s quite boring. And what drives us is the need to solve problems, to build things, to do things. And I find that being around people it creates that energy that allows you to find these opportunities more so than if you’re just sat in front of a computer doom scrolling, so to speak.

And yeah, we did Retain. Retain was an incredible experience. Some of the speakers there were absolutely phenomenal. It invoked a passion in me, and we talked about this on the train on the way back down to London, that it made me realize that I’d spent, We get stuck in our stories sometime, and I was stuck in mine, and so having moved elements of my life to allow me to be able to enjoy being back in that environment and I’d never been to a WordCamp.

I’d been to some local WordPress meetups, but I was, again, very much outside of the WordPress ecosystem. And so after we got back from Retain, Jack was like, “We’re going to another event.” And I was like, “Cool. Where’s this one?” And he was like, “Arizona.” And I was like, “Okay. That’s a long flight.” And he was like, “Don’t worry.

We’re flying business.” I was like, “Course we are, Jack.” So we went out… ‘Cause… A- and by the way, that’s not just ’cause Jack’s flushed. That’s because Jack knows how to work air miles and credit cards effectively, and that is a game, if you’re not aware of it I implore you to look into because that man is a genius at getting discounts and deals and business flights for a few hundred dollars.

It’s it’s an art to watch him do it. And so we fly out to Arizona, and we we spent some time at this event and so Arizona PressConf is a very special event for me for multiple reasons. And so one of those reasons is because during the event, I got to witness something that, for me, was incredible.

And it was on day two. It was where, as I was walking into the conference room, there was a group of guys outside the conference room in a circle, and they were sharing, and they were openly talking about some of the challenges that men go through, and it was a… It was an incredibly cathartic mental health I’m not gonna say exercise, but just just an opportunity for just some incredible nurturing, let’s just say that.

I think that’s a good choice of words, for, for men in that environment to really open up emotionally and intellectually and mentally and share some of the challenges that guys go through that they don’t often talk about. And that to me was like, “Wow, this is not just a WordPress event, and this is not just a, a business event.

This is bl-” And you mentioned Tony Robbins, and so I’m very much attuned to that kind of world. And so this was personal development and business development, and the way that it was fused together in a way that people didn’t even realize what was happening, these incredible moments were just popping like fireworks everywhere.

And I got to witness this and I also got to witness Raquel, who as the owner of the, the event is someone who… The first t- the first night I met her, she turned around to me and she said, “I’m gonna change the world.” And I thought to myself, “Okay, people say that. Sure.” And then on, on the first day of the event, ’cause the first night was obviously the mixer and everything, the first day of the event, I saw her on stage and I was like, “Wow, actually, I believe you.”

She had that presence, that energy, that power to be able to really command, and then obviously just watching and seeing what she’d built and coming from the event space. PressConf… And I know it used to be Pressnomics, and it was reborn. It- It’s so much more than an event. To call it an event almost does it a disservice.

It is it’s… I would call it a lifestyle. The people that go to those events choose to be at those events ’cause they want to be in proximity to the people at those events. You have people on stage that have just sold companies for 300 million. You’ve got people that are flying in that, that Raquel is incredible at leveraging these, these people to be able to deliver.

Just like Katie Keefe did a talk and it was such a… And it almost set the tone for the weekend, she was talking about the struggles with her child, she was talking about the challenges with business, and it was relatable. It was so relatable that it allowed people to look at the problems that they maybe weren’t feeling comfortable to share, but then it give them that safe space to do that.

So that to me was phenomenal. So after press conf, went back to the UK for two weeks with Jack, and then pretty much just got on a plane and went straight back out to Arizona and spent a month out there. Come back from there to Poland to WordCamp. And so that was my first WordCamp experience to go to an actual WordCamp event.

That was my first time seeing a WordCamp. And yeah it’s it’s really opened my eyes. And so I got to experience WordCamp from two perspectives as a person who’s been using WordPress for a long time, as somebody who is giving back to WordPress through the plugin ecosystem and through w- products that we offer and also as Raquel’s partner now, ’cause there’s a lot that happened in Arizona

I also got to see behind the scenes of how the event was run and what was happening, and the volunteers and the passion and the love and the people who have made it their life’s mission to create this community. I thought for a long time that WordPress was software. To me, that was my…

WordPress is software, it’s a tool, you use it to make money. I no longer believe that. And I’ve had many a debate with people online about WordPress is dying and the ecosystem’s dying and, WordPress is being replaced by AI and we… all of these conversations. But WordPress, in my opinion, can’t die.

Even if the boss presses the red button, it doesn’t matter. It’s never gonna switch off because WordPress isn’t a company, WordPress isn’t a product, and WordPress definitely isn’t software, in my eyes, in my opinion. To me, WordPress is community. And so yeah, getting to experience the community physically, like in a sense of being together with people.

And I’m not talking about the main events, I’m talking about the side parties, I’m talking about the side tracks and the conversations that happen outside the main room, just absolutely phenomenal. Just blows my mind that… i’m a little bit annoyed at myself for it taking so long to get into this space knowing it’s been there all that time.

So yeah it’s been a absolute whirlwind this year, but one that I’ve I’ve loved every minute of it 

Chris Badgett: You know, it’s, the community is around WordPress and digital software and entrepreneurship and information and products. We’re going through a period of rapid flux and transition. I think it’s a mistake to say, “Oh X is gonna die,” or, “Y is gonna die.”

But the community is a huge part of what makes WordPress and all the people involved special. However, many of the companies are struggling with some challenges with growth and, other tools and competition. Education is changing. Like for example, in my world, why take an online course when you can just ask an AI chat and get your answer there?

So there’s all this stuff happening, but like you said, when you had the financial freedom barrier removed, you got a little lost. So my biggest concern with AI is really that it is awesome to be financially free, and that should be, that’s a great goal. But there’s a part of humans that need to struggle.

We’re literally struggle machines. And and then we also need to connect with other humans.

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Steve Woody: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: It’s so interesting. So if robots and AI take all the jobs, I’m really concerned, but I also have faith in the power of community. And, And also just being flexible. It’s not… Like you said, it’s, WordPress isn’t just software.

What we do isn’t just WordPress. There’s other community stuff. I’m sure you love to help an entrepreneur with a brick-and-mortar business, as an example. It’s still, that’s just another community that’s your entrepreneur vibe that let’s… It doesn’t even matter what tools we’re using.

We’re just helping each other. But how do you see this going forward? ‘Cause I feel like we’re a society in transition, and if you look at AI conversations, there’s the concept of the singularity and then super super intelligence. And so what, where does the human fit? And I think community is going to just become more and more valuable, like human community.

And I’m not anti-AI. I love AI. Oops. I have an AI agent powered by Automem, and it’s awesome. But I can be pro-AI and pro-human at the same time, but I do have some concerns about the future. 

Steve Woody: This is the part of the conversation I really enjoy. So there’s a few books. One of them is called Tribes by Seth Godin.

It’s an incredible book. Talks about bringing people together and about finding your people, and I think that is vital. I think we need that. We’re not designed to be solo on this planet. We’re designed to be in partnerships. We’re designed to be around people. And that goes, some people choose religion, some people choose football, some people choose politics, whatever it is.

I know there’s always gonna be segregation, there’s always gonna be two sides to it. But ultimately we all want to belong and we all want to comm- connemme. I don’t know why, but we wanna… For a better choice of words, I was gonna say wanna fight and the other F word, make love. But it’s just as humans, that’s what we’re wired to do, right?

So I think ultimately, if you look at the cell on a cel- cellular level, the first thing is survival. We wanna survive. And once, once we’re comfortable surviving, then our DNA wants to reproduce. So that’s what we do. And so ultimately, if we can create a comfortable environment, then we get complacent, we d- get a little bit lazy and we need something to push us.

AI is great at, it’s an incredible disruption, and it’s a disruption that’s happening. If you look at, Look at computers and computer software, and then look at the internet, right? The internet obviously increased the the ability to be able to deliver. And then you’ve got mobile phones.

Again, increased the ability to deliver at a level. Now you’ve got AI. So what we’re doing is we’re stacking up these incredible technologies on top of each other, which is just boosting the run- or reducing the runway to time to market is so quick now. It’s phenomenal. You can have a fully functioning CRM with a CMS, with everything built overnight in a couple of prompts.

It’s phenomenal But there’s also social media, and we don’t have enough data right now with social media to be able to look at the mental impacts. We’re starting to talk about it, the negative impact it’s got on kids. Governments are now starting to put limits in place, and we’re starting to see that there’s this, this real addiction to this dopamine hit that we get through this instant gratification.

And This is what scares me right now, and I think that the two biggest businesses that we’re gonna see come out the next decade, going a little bit off topic, but I think they’re gonna be event businesses or retreats, but physical businesses and therapists, because I think everyone’s gonna need me- and we’ve started to see a, a, a slight mental health pandemic, but nothing compared to what I think is coming.

Because when you lose your sense of purpose it really throws out your north pole. And it… and if you’re not prepared… i’ve done a lot of personal development, and I really struggled during that phase. And so if I struggled through that phase, and I’m not saying I’m better than anyone else, but I had tools equipped to be able to use them.

People that don’t have those tools and can’t have access to those tools are going to really struggle, and I don’t think we’ve seen anything yet compared to what’s coming. On the flip side, I think people are freaking out over AI, but I think they’re also missing, and this is just an opinion I don’t have the data to back this up completely, but as an example, if we look at what happened a couple of years ago in Germany a lot of money was invested into…

And I do a lot of macro and micro market analysis, trading and things. But if we look at what happened in Germany, they invested a lot of money in wind power. And then there’s a, a saying, and I can’t remember what it is, but there is a specific saying in, in Germany for no wind, and they had 12 to 14 days with no wind, and it had the potential to cripple the economy ’cause they had to import power.

And if you’ve ever had to import something over your usage, you’ll know you get charged a premium for it. And so AI and crypto together with the, the power that they’re harnessing it does two things. One, it has the ability to cripple a country, to literally cripple the power grid of a country. So some things that people aren’t aware of at the moment is a bit like in Dubai where they had the housing boom, and then it died off.

If… I think it was around 2015 or whenever it was, but the, the… They stopped building in Dubai before they finished it. And so that’s happening with data centers right now. There are so many data centers that were being built as part of a valuation for an, an LLM or an AI company. These data centers are now just sitting empty.

They’re not even finished. Even if the data centers get built, we don’t have the physical components in the world to be able to build the transistors and all of the networks and the grids and the electricity pylons and everything that’s needed to power that infrastructure. We don’t, we, we don’t have… we’re running on a, a deficit right now.

We don’t have the physical components and materials to build at the speed that we need it. So I’m not even that worried about AI, and people don’t even consider this angle, but in order to get to where AI needs to be, where it’s not just a chatbot that you can talk… And don’t get me wrong, it’s clever, it’s smart, but it is still a set of rules.

And yes, you can automate mundane tasks, but it st- it doesn’t think for itself. Yes, you can use an orchestrator, and you can allow AI agents to talk to each other, and it can do a lot of your job for you. It can. It can automate so much. I’ll give you a quick example. Mine– One of mine has the, It’s connected into my Fitbit.

It knows how many steps I’ve done, it knows how much sleep I got last night, it knows my my what I’m doing work-wise and throughout the day through the apps that I use. And as a result, it knows what to order me and put in my shopping basket, and it’s like, “Oh, you haven’t had enough protein this week, but you’ve worked out, so I’m gonna order you some extra chicken.”

It’s got access to my credit card, and so it orders my shopping for me automatically. And so this is just an example of just how we’re starting to use systems now. And yeah, they are incredible. But we’re not gonna see this just continuously go on and on. It’s gonna hit a plateau. It’s gonna, it’s gonna dip.

We’re gonna have a correction. It– the market has to, the world has to. And so there are a lot of people, a lot of people who are scared of AI. And if you look at the people who are using AI, it’s a very small minority, and sometimes it feels like you’re in a bubble because of that. But you talk to most sixteen, seventeen, eighteen-year-olds, they will tell you that AI is destroying the planet.

They will tell you that AI is taking all of the jobs. They’ll tell you that AI is, all… they hate it. And you can argue, yes there’s an energy problem, but until you are faced with a challenge, you don’t have the opportunity. If we look at what’s happening in El Salvador at the moment, they’re starting to harness the power of volcanoes to be able to create new energy sources.

So it– You, you can’t get the ability to innovate until you first have a problem you need to overcome. So crypto and AI together are causing us to innovate energy to a much higher level. And, I’ve got Elon talking about like farming in space, and good luck to him. Crack on. It’ll be fascinating to see what happens.

But I’m not worried in the short term because a lot of business owners, yes, they might use AI. And by the way, when we say use AI, most people who use AI, they use the free version of ChatGPT. Developers will use Claude, and a few people will use everything or their own custom version. But most people will stick to either ChatGPT, or they’ll chat to Claude, and they’ll get it to do some basic tasks.

But I would say the majority of people I’ve spoken to in AI, they’ve built a great dashboard on localhost, and now they have an idea of just how screwed they are, but they don’t actually know what to do with it. And so this brings me to the final point with AI is that a bit like with sat nav, the way that before sat nav existed, we had physical maps.

You’d have to stop at a service station, you’d have to look at a map, you’d have to plot your route, you’d have to understand what the roads meant, how it worked. Now, you turn up at your destination, you don’t even know how you got there. I turn around to my daughter and I’m like, “Drive us into town,” and she wouldn’t even know what roads to take.

She’d have to rely on the sat nav. And so what I mean by this is it’s removed our ability to think critically And so AI is making people dumber because they sto- they’ve stopped thinking, and they’re just relying now on an output, and AI is being trained on previous models, and it’s like garbage in, garbage out.

And so I don’t think AI is evolving as much as the marketing is telling us it is. Yes they’re allowing us more features to connect the dots, and MCPs are phenomenal for being able to allow tooling. You already mentioned AutoMem. So AutoMem is a, a vector database that uses two different vector databases to to mimic short and long-term memory through a dream cycle with relevance to give you a context window that isn’t just gonna destroy your RAM or blow your tokens up.

So having this– having these systems, watching these things get built, they’re incredible. But there are still business owners out there who are scared and are not willing to move. And yes, can we really be able to plug in with one prompt in an evening? Of course, we can. Are people gonna do it? Some will, but there’s a lot of other people that have spent so much physical money, so much emotional bandwidth, so much mental strain to build what they’ve got.

They’re not willing to move. They’re not able to move. And so I don’t think WordPress is going anywhere either not in the short term 

Chris Badgett: Let’s land the plane on the mindset thing. ‘Cause I think that’s where you and I really connect, and a lot of the people, like the vibe you were talking about at Press Conf and some of the pop-up experiences.

And mindset, I’m just gonna throw in one pro tip. One of the things that helps me is I spend a lot of time in nature. I’ve lived through the Alaskan winter in a tent with a wood stove with… When it’s 30 below. And I had- I put in a hand pump well that I had- I would have to thaw with a propane torch in the middle of winter to pump water.

But because I had that base, it just gives me perspective on everything else. So that… So getting out in nature, you don’t have to be extreme- extremo like me, but it’s very grounding in your humanity. The other piece is, goes back to community, which becomes more and more valuable in a world where all this automation and abstraction is happening.

But I wanna dig in a little bit, ’cause I’m the same as you. If I talk to a younger person, including my own children, they’re very against AI. And I get it because, if you’re graduating into an economy where all the jobs are replaced by AI and robots, that’s scary. Everything has an immune response.

I don’t know, just in my niche, for example, if you look at something like university education, which is very expensive in the United States and many other parts of the world people are doing the calculation of return on investment for spending 200 grand on college, and then there’s all the uncertainty about the jobs.

The whole American dream, go to school, get into a good college, get a good job, it’s really under question of does this model work like it used to? And it’s changed in many ways already. But 

Steve Woody: the mindset- let me just say- Yeah, go ahead. Sorry. Go on. I was gonna s- just one point, ’cause when I was teaching at university, there was…

i… There’s something that I said to my students. I sat down on the first day. I had about 60 students in the class, and I said to them, “Look, if you leave this university and the only thing that you have is a degree, you’ve failed If you haven’t used this opportunity to build experiences, to build relationships to try and to fail and to learn and to grow, then you’ve completely missed the point of being here.

Chris Badgett: That’s a great point. Learning is what makes us human. It’s not going away, and there’s so many types of learning in addition to tests and textbooks and lectures. But in terms of the mindset, like you and I obviously, and many of the people we connect with and resonate with, your vibe attracts your tribe.

I find myself in a bubble of growth mindset people. So I’m not scared of AI. I have concerns, but I’m I have an open mind. So but sometimes you’ll see, let’s say inside a company where a developer may actually be concerned about their job and being replaced with AI. And in my view, like the better mindset is like why don’t you try to augment yourself with AI and just make yourself 10X more valuable and figure out these things like AutoMem and agent orchestration and, solve problems with AI.

‘Cause essentially that’s what we’re doing at work, is solving problems, and you just have new tools. And while you’re at it, don’t forget that you’re a human being. We’ve seen this m- movie before. Facebook or Twitter or whatever does not replace real in-the-flash human relationships. It’s great to have a lot of shallow connections on the internet.

I love meeting people that I’ve known online forever. This is one of the benefits of community and you’re like, “Oh my God, there’s Zach Katz. He’s seven feet tall. I had no idea.” “I recognize you, but dude, I’m like, I’m usually the tall guy.” You don’t look like your avatar? Yeah. I do. It’s true. And we’re great friends, but, For anybody really, there’s the youth and their mindset, there’s entrepreneurs and their mindset, there’s employees and their mindset, there’s successful entrepreneurs and their mindset, there’s startup entrepreneurs and their mindset.

What do you recommend here or what’s your, what are your pearls of wisdom around mindset in a world that has never been changing faster with exponential technologies like crypto, AI, robotics, and other things just going at a pace that the human being is not necessarily… We don’t have 100,000 years of genetics like we have around you need to eat, figure out how to eat.

Now there’s, like, all this stuff going on.

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Steve Woody: I think that is a fantastic question, and my

Chris Badgett: I was- how do you not lose yourself? Like, how do you not lose yourself? So I start, 

Steve Woody: yeah. 

Chris Badgett: And then how do you set yourself up- Start with 

Steve Woody: the outcome … 

Chris Badgett: for success? 

Steve Woody: So get comfortable being uncomfortable.

That’s the first thing. I think it’s important that when we are struggling, and a lot of people are struggling, and change invokes a lot of fear, it involves a lot of uncertainty, and when you’re in that space of being fearful, uncertain, when you’re struggling, it causes pain. And I have a saying that I believe that is hurt people.

And so often when we’re caught in that cycle, and we’re caught in that mindset of spiraling and… I don’t like to label things, and I definitely don’t like to use medical labels, so things like depression or things like, like whatever the, the word might be, but anxiety and all of these things that people suffer with, ultimately, it could be changed quite simply by physiol- Like, you could…

If you get up and move. If you see someone who’s depressed, if you were to picture someone as depressed, they’re probably gonna be slumped over. They’re gonna be sitting like this. They’re gonna be like, they’re gonna be like that. But if you see somebody who’s sitting up, they’re sitting up straight, they’ve got good posture, or they’re walking around, and they’re just more…

it creates in… So for me, the absolute first thing, if you wanna work on your mindset, the base layer has to be your health. You have to work on your physical health if you want to improve your mental health. And by the way, if your mental health is not in a good place, you’re not gonna want to work on your physical health.

So to me, Eric Thomas, he’s a fantastic lecturer, he says, “Until you want success as bad as you want to breathe, you’re not gonna be successful.” So people chase money. They think that’s what they want. Money is a byproduct of value. So if you’re adding value to the world, that’s gonna make money, and that’s gonna help you, and that’s gonna put you in a better place and around better people.

You can’t add value to the world until you’re adding value to yourself. So ultimately, it has to start with yourself. So I would say hydration, absolutely above and beyond. And you might think this is basics and it’s stupid, but it’s true. We often forget to hydrate. We often forget posture. We often forget to just go for a walk.

You mentioned nature. You mentioned the stuff you do to get outside. When you’re up against a crunch or when you’re struggling you almost feel guilty for stepping away from your, what you need to be focused on. But if you look at the productive hours you spend in a day, I can do much more in six hours productively than someone that sits at a screen for twelve hours.

Because I know that time’s gonna be hyper-focused, it’s gonna be beneficial for me, and I’m gonna be locked in. So the absolute best tool that I have in my arsenal is my diary. So my calendar is blocked out every hour of every day, what am I doing? Am I learning something? Am I talking to somebody? Am I spending some time on my own?

What am I doing? Now, it’s very easy when you’ve got a calendar to just start ignoring things. If you set an alert for the same time every day, you’ll just start snoozing it. So you have to make sure and push yourself to… and this is why automation is amazing. It is great. I love it. We build it But there is still something so powerful about doing something manually.

I still do manual bookkeeping. And you might think to yourself, “What is the point? You can just chuck your bank statements into AI, and it’ll do it all for you.” Yes, it will. But when it does that, what it won’t allow me to do is have the emotional connection to, “Oh, shit, I spent too much on McDonald’s this month.

I need to rein that in.” So you get to see the patterns, and you get to connect to the patterns which you wouldn’t otherwise get to do. So yeah, AI’s phenomenal. It can do incredible things, but what it can’t do is it can’t change you in here. That comes from you being connected to something, often through pain, struggling, suffering, or an experience.

And if you’re not gonna experience it yourself, then maybe you can experience it through someone else. If you’re very lucky, you’ll learn by someone else’s mistakes. But often, we have to make mistakes. You don’t grow when you’re comfortable. You don’t grow when you’re happy. You grow when you’re suffering, when you’re struggling.

And so I think it’s important to get comfortable being uncomfortable and to not not to see it for worse than it actually is. If it’s bad, you can see it for being bad, but don’t catastrophize things to make them so bad that… Y- I say this to my daughter, it was a saying that I have as a father is it’s not my job to stop her falling over, and it’s not even my job to pick her up if she falls over.

It’s my job to ensure that one day when I’m not around, she’s able to pick herself up. And so giving people the tools so that they can do things themselves is really important. And so what works for me may not work for you, may not work for the listeners. You gotta find what works for you, but the only way you can start that is by actually doing something.

And I’ll give you an example with this. Yesterday, very good friend of mine, he is a personal trainer coming up to 40 years old, doesn’t wanna personally train anymore. So went out and got a sales job working for a media company in the UK selling advertising space on billboards. Goes into the office on the first day, and there’s 10 sales staff, and this is a real company.

Got about half a million billboards in the UK, very reputable company. 10 sales staff, all of them have an area in the UK, and they’re all responsible for the lo- locations of these billboards, and then they have to go and find all of the companies, be it taxi companies or hair and beauty salons, whatever it might be, and they have to…

a cold ou- outreach to them to try and sell them advertising space. And I took one look at this, and I was like that’s an inefficient system.” And so I sat down with my friend, and I said, “Let me just build you a simple dashboard, a simple system.” We vibe coded it. It was very simple. And the average salesman in that company sends 100 emails a day.

They had a- an Amazon reward thing within the sales team where somebody got a gift card ’cause they did 350 emails in a day. Well done, you. On my friend’s first day in the company, within an hour, he’d done fifteen hundred emails. With auto replies set up through AI to be able to manage that, his commission on closing just one percent, which is what is the industry standard, he gets thirty percent commission on a sale.

By just closing, having a one percent conversion rate on that business, he’s making a hundred and fifty thousand pounds. There’s so many opportunities out there to take a boomer business, to redefine it, to take it to a new level, to be able to get… if you’re just worried about money, there are so many ways to earn money out there.

You don’t need to struggle. But if you want to build something meaningful, if you wanna be part of a community, then sometimes you don’t wanna be on the cutting edge of bleeding technology. You wanna be where everyone’s comfortable, where everyone’s familiar, and that’s why I don’t think WordPress is going away.

You’ve gotta be comfortable being uncomfortable. You’ve gotta be able to push yourself and go to new areas. But also, if you live there, it’s exhausting. So you have to be able to come back to comfort, and you have to be able to balance between the two. So I’d say the key word in all of this is balance.

So be comfortable being uncomfortable and find balance, and if you can do that, you’ll be okay 

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome, Steve. I’m gonna ask you one more question. It’s actually nine questions in one, so this is a rapid- Okay … fire round. 

Steve Woody: All 

Chris Badgett: right. So let me give you the setup. Here’s the challenge. I look at it like the spiral, right?

So you’re either on a downward spiral, or you’re- Okay … plateaued and you’re just level and stuck, or you’re on the upward spiral. And nobody is perfect, and we all oscillate and have plateau periods or downward spiral periods, something that, bad happens in our life or whatever. But ideally, we wanna be generally trending on the upward spiral.

So the nine questions in one is this. I may have done the math wrong, by the way. Math is not my strong suit. I love 

Steve Woody: this. No. 

Chris Badgett: All right. So you only get one answer per question. 

Steve Woody: Okay. 

Chris Badgett: So- 

Steve Woody: And do I have to answer as quick as I can? 

Chris Badgett: It’s more- What- … like one story from your life and one pro tip- Okay

Per area. 

Steve Woody: Okay. 

Chris Badgett: So if you’re on the downward spiral in some way- 

… 

Chris Badgett: What’s something f- maybe from your life that made you continue down faster? All right. 

And then on the plateau, what’s one thing from your life, and then some advice that kept you on the plateau? You could just, could not go…

Luckily, you weren’t going down, but you were flat. And then the th- the last one is the upward spiral. What’s something that pushed you to get that, escape velocity and that upward momentum? So I don’t think that’s nine questions. What’d you do to make a downward spiral worse? What’d you do to ensure that you stayed- I love this

stayed stuck on a plateau? And then what’d you do to achieve escape velocity to go higher? Oh, I think this is- So I think it’s just three questions. 

Steve Woody: No, but I love it. I love it. I’ll be respectful of the the time I answer these as well, but okay. So downward spiral, I’ve done this a lot. So for context I used to be homeless when I left the army.

I lived in a car for six months. I’ve been bankrupt. I’ve literally been in the gutter, so I’ve had to… And I don’t have a trust fund. I don’t have a family wealth that’s afforded me the life I’ve got. I’ve had to build it from the ground up. And I have a saying that I’m gonna be successful because I know I’m running out of things to do wrong.

I have done so many things, and I’ve messed up so many times. And so for me, on that downward spiral, which I know that so well, the thing that keeps me going down is the- Your mindset. When you’re in that place, you can’t… The thing that got you there is not the thing that’s gonna get you out. And so if you keep doing the same thing that got you to that place, you’re gonna keep going.

And what happens, what tends to happen is when things go bad, you start to blame yourself. You start to… Y- you’re not kind to yourself, so you start to beat yourself up, you start to bully yourself, if you took the voices in my head and you personified them as two people and let them talk, you would interject.

You would not allow those two people to talk to each other in that way, yet we do it to ourselves in our head all the time. We talk shit to ourselves all the time. And I think on the downward spiral, the thing that made me spiral more than anything was my inner dialogue, the things that I said to myself and the way that I talked to myself.

And so my tip would be force yourself, make time to meditate. If you wanna get fit, if you wanna get healthy, you go to the gym, you train a physical muscle, and you see the improvement. Why would you not train your mental muscles? Why would you not take time to actively train your brain to meditate, to use mantras, to use affirmations, to talk positively, to inspire yourself?

‘Cause it has to start from within. There’s a, a fantastic book called “The Master Key System” and it talks about for something to exist, you first must think it. When you think it, you can do it. When you do it can be. And so for me, it’s the internal dialogue, getting that in check, and then even if it’s something as simple as breathing.

So the action step that I would take if you’re on a downward spiral is to stop and breathe, and a great technique for that is a guy called Wim Hof. Wim Hof, the Ice Man, he has a, a fantastic, Does a lot of ice challenges, a lot of cold water therapy, but he talks about breathing and there’s a lot of things you can do around breathing.

The, the simple one that I’ll give you right now is the four by four. So you just go in on four, you go four very short bursts of inward breath through your nose, and as you do it, you tap your fingers, and then out the same way. You repeat that for f- for 60 seconds, your state will change. You will feel different.

You cannot approach a problem when you’re in a negative mindset. So yeah, the, the thing that, that made me spiral down more than anything was my mindset, and breathing is gonna be the best way to regulate yourself, meditation to allow… And that’s why yoga is an insane thing to… If you’ve got the opportunity, go to a yoga class.

You’re around other people, it’s a different environment. It forces you to be able to do that. So absolutely recommend that you go and do that. That’s just life advice. That’s through my life I’ve learned that. Plateauing I would say the thing that causes me to plateau o- or to plateau more than anything is arrogance and ego.

Some of the… Three of the, the most dangerous words in the English language is, “I know that.” As soon as you say, “I know that,” you’re cutting off the opportunity to learn something new. And so always be the dumbest person in the room. Always surround yourself with people that are smarter than you. Always ask questions.

There is no such thing as a stupid question, it’s just the one that you didn’t ask. And so the reason I was never able to grow and I wasn’t going up or down, was because I believed I knew the answer, and I was arrogant or unwilling to try something new, and I was just stuck. And a lot of that come from just ignorance, and it come from just the unwillingness to listen.

We have… And ironically, I haven’t shut up throughout this podcast. I appreciate that, but we have one mouth and two ears for a reason, so you should use them in that order. Well- 

Chris Badgett: And the 

Steve Woody: upward spiral You should listen more than you talk. And the upward spiral is absolutely, without a shadow of doubt, proximity.

The people that you’re around. If you are around people… A- and you are the sum of the five people you spend most of your time with. So it really helps to be around successful people. Just today, me and my daughter, we went to we went to visit one of lo- the UK’s largest private car collections today.

Gentleman’s got a collection of 60 million pounds worth of Ferraris in his house, and this is an incredible guy who sold a company, a telecom company, for a absolute fortune. Some of his cars alone are almost worth eight figures. And so when you’re in that environment, and when you see how these people are and how they act and how they are around each other, and you realize that, you always wanna be helping people.

You always wanna be trying to offer value. It’s not about what you can take, it’s about what you can give. If you wanna make money, you have to give value. So it’s not “I wanna take something. How can I take your money?” It’s, “No, how can I give you value first, and then I will get something back as a result.”

And so by proximity, by being around good people, by always offering yourself of giving value first… And I’m not talking about working for free, because you’ve gotta, you’ve gotta respect… You’ve gotta have boundaries. You’ve gotta be able to res- respect yourself. So it’s not about I’m gonna go and work for free until I make it, but it’s about having the respect, being around good people, and having that ability to add value.

And that has every single time when I’ve been on a run, it’s been because I have been breathing. I’ve been meditating. I’ve been physically training. I’ve put myself in the best possible state. I’m hydrated. As a result, my mind is working better. I’m sleeping better, so I’m having better conversations with better people.

Every single time something has gone well in my life, it has been because in that state, I’ve given value, and as a result, I’ve got something back as a result of it. So if you can apply that or find that logic, then that, that’s my advice 

Chris Badgett: That is amazing. And I just wanna highlight the compounding nature, both on the way up and the way down.

Steve Woody: Oh, 

Chris Badgett: yes. These things stack, so when it’s scary living in exponential times, you are also an exponential animal. You can make things drastically better by stacking- Of course … or drastically worse, or stay flat by not stacking at all. 

Steve Woody: If you’re on the way down, and if you’re on the way down right now, my best advice to you is to change your state.

And the best way to do that is just put your hands in the air and treat it like a rollercoaster. You’re going down anyway, right? So just enjoy the ride. It’s not until you start to do that you’ll be able to flip it around. So yeah, you’ve gotta, you’ve gotta, you’ve gotta pull yourself out of the state that you’re currently in order to change it, 

Chris Badgett: i’m gonna do a quick lightning round for myself, and then we’ll close it out. And I resonate a lot with what Steve said. But the downward spiral, I’ve been in that entrepreneur place, working nights, and just not sleeping well, high anxiety, just really going down. And I actually came across an online course called Wake Up Productive by Eben Pagan, and it was like…

And this is before all this was super popular about having a morning routine and everything. So I was like, “Yeah, I’m gonna, I’m gonna start developing my morning routine.” So I just did a half-mile walk down a dirt road every single morning after a glass of water. That was, like, the foundation. And then in terms of compounding over time, earlier this year, I ran 100 miles, which is insane.

I became an ultra runner. But it all started from just committing on the calendar, even when I didn’t feel like it, to do that morning walk, get sunlight. I’m stacking. I’m moving my body, I’m getting sunlight, I’m getting hydration first thing in the morning. I’m not going straight to my phone.

That’s, that got me off that. In terms of plateauing, I think to stay on the plateau, ignore two things. Ignore community, and ignore learning. Like Steve said, “I know that” are very dangerous words. So being a lifelong learner is really what it’s, what it means to be human. We’re supposed to keep learning and evolving all, all the way through our entire life.

And then on the upward spiral, my pro tip there is to… I got lucky, ’cause I kinda found it. There, there’s randomness, there’s luck, and there’s strategy, and they all come into play. But what I found is that when I could align my life mission with my company mission, everything wasn’t so hard anymore. So my dedication to lifting up others through learning, and like Steve said, first focusing on myself- And then my company does that through software.

It’s so aligned that it literally doesn’t feel like work. I do consider myself lucky, and I… Yes, there’s parts of my job where I have to, quote, “Sweep the floor” and do something I don’t wanna do. But when you can align your work and your life purpose together that really unlocks that upward spiral compounding.

So that’s Steve Woody. Steve, where can people find you if they wanna connect with you? And also if you enjoyed this episode, I’d love a comment below the YouTube video or send us an email. If you want me to do another one with Steve on a specific topic or go deep or do more of the same, just let us know.

I’d love to hear from you. But finding Steve is awesome. I found a new friend. And it’s a brother from another mother experience that you can have when you get outside of the building, your comfort zone. You don’t have the, all the answers. You hang out with people that are… Yeah, you may share some things, but Steve is also very different from me.

He’s an extrovert of the extreme variety. I’m an introvert of the extreme variety, but it clicks. It works. 

Steve Woody: Opposites attract, yeah. 

Chris Badgett: So it’s it’s fun. So where can the good people find you, Steve? 

Steve Woody: On, on my socials, I’m on Steve Woody. But otherwise WP Fusion. WPfusion.com is the best place, or [email protected] the purveyor of finely tuned WordPress plugins as Jack likes to call it.

But no I’m available on most of the time I only really use Facebook, and I use it for friends and family. I typically try and avoid social media as much as I can. I don’t try and use it for marketing or promotion. I love real-life connections with people, and I love to actually meet people and to talk to people, and I’m happy to connect on socials, but you’re not gonna find me posting too much on there.

You’re gonna, you’re gonna find me at the events. You’re gonna find me in the real world. And I’m always up for going for a run, Chris. 

Chris Badgett: All right. It’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when. 

Steve Woody: Thank you, Steve. When. We need to lock that in. Thank you, brother. Love you, brother. Thank you so much.

Appreciate you. I appreciate you. Yeah, you too, brother. Take care.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMScast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at lifterlms.com/gift. Go to lifterlms.com/gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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Chris Badgett discusses how AI is transforming the development, administration, and use of WordPress websites. He discusses leveraging AI technologies like Claude and ChatGPT to communicate directly with WordPress rather than manually navigating dashboards and menus with John Turner, the author of WPVibe.ai, in this LMScast episode. John Tuners also has a YouTube Channel.

One of the main topics of discussion is how AI can speed up and simplify WordPress administration. With WPVibe, users can integrate AI with their WordPress websites to carry out activities like developing courses, adding and enrolling students, upgrading plugins, doing accessibility and SEO audits, producing content, altering websites, and even designing new WordPress themes. Chris emphasizes how HR departments, agencies, freelancers, and LMS owners may find this particularly helpful.

For instance, without having to manually import people or go through several WordPress pages, an HR manager could use AI to develop a safety training course, add hundreds of employees, and enroll them in it. Chris also talks about how important it is to provide AI with additional context. AI can do much more than just respond to inquiries when it has access to a WordPress website, analytics, Google Search Console, email, and other resources.

It has the ability to evaluate data, offer suggestions, and act. He gives an example of how an AI agent can find and replace missing alt text in thousands of photos, a work that would have taken weeks for a person to do. Chris also stresses that since AI is developing quickly, individuals should begin studying and playing with it right away.

According to him, AI is a tool where users take on the role of director, directing the system toward the intended outcome. People can get an edge in their profession and learn how to use AI more quickly if they play with it more. In general, Chris believes AI will be the next development in the creation and administration of WordPress websites. AI is now enabling individuals to create, administer, optimize, and personalize websites using natural conversation, often without the need to know how to code, just as WordPress formerly made website building accessible to non-developers.

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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 back on the show, back from episode 2009, where we talked about SeedProd, but this is John Turner. He’s a, a very prolific WordPress creator, a super awesome guy. He has WPvibe.ai, which essentially allows you to build a WordPress website, manage it, modify it from an AI chat connection we’re gonna dive into that today.

AI is, sweeping the world. I’m so glad John is working on the opportunity in WordPress, and we’re gonna go deep into what WPVibe is, how it works, and how you can think about it for the future, and how to get started with it. But first, welcome on the show, John. Awesome. Thank you for having me, Chris.

Yeah, it has been a while. I’m super excited to be here. I’m super excited to, to talk about AI, because I know there is an education gap right now, and I think that definitely needs to be filled to help move and excel WordPress with AI, so excited to be here. I have this saying that every s- company, but we could say every software company, is a education company, whether they realize it or not.

And particularly with a new emerging technology like AI, it’s never been more important. Let’s lay the groundwork just in terms of terminology, ’cause there’s gonna be people listening and watching of different experience levels. Sure. We have, AI models, we have MCP servers, we have connectors, we have WPVibe we have WordPress abilities.

Give us the 101 on what the key terms are and what they mean. Sure. Typically what most people are familiar with is they’ll go to ChatGPT or Claude.ai and they’ll talk to a chatbot, okay? And that’s where they’re just talking and then getting a reply back, okay? Now, what has happened is they’ve started expanding that ability.

So both of them have added… they have different names for it. Some of them call it connectors, some of them call it apps, some of them call it plugins. But essentially, they’re all MCPs in the background, and MCP is just a technical term for the protocol that AI uses to ter- talk to third-party sites.

So essentially, imagine you wanna talk to your Gmail or have AI read your Gmail. You would use the Gmail connector, which is essentially an MCP under the hood, okay? So basically, that’s how you connect other side other sides. Then you have agents, and agents are typically things that will do stuff for you.

So imagine you’re like read all my email and close all the spam ones and let me know the ones I need to reply to. So AI would run a series of calls to make that happen, and that is s- essentially is agent functionality Nice. Nice. And I actually do that. I use Claude Cowork to- Yeah … read my email, get rid of the cold pitches and everything, and also Slack me the most important things with a link to open the email right away- Yeah

on a scheduled task that happens every day at 5:00 PM. So that’s an example. And it’s surprisingly really good, I bet, right? It is, and I just wanna note on that, I had to get over some fear. I’m like, “Oh, I don’t know, if I give Claude access to my email, is there a risk? Is it gonna start- Yeah … doing things?”

But then I started thinking about it, and I was like, Gmail reads all my emails and serves ads based on what it’s seeing and- Yeah … Anthropic or Claude is actually pretty secure. Yeah. I’ve made mistakes where I’ve put something in Claude Code or a chat or something, and it’s like, “Oops, you shared that secret key.

You’re not supposed to do that. I’m deleting that.” “Go ahead. Here are the steps to reset that and all that.” Yeah. It’s actually s- I find it safe, but it does feel risky, but all technology feels that way, right? Yeah. A- and really, it c- this is kinda where the model conversation comes in.

So each company makes a variety of models, and then if you might have heard things of Hermes or OpenClaw. You can use open source models with them. So your risk level really depends how smart the model is. So Claude is actually known for being safe models. They put a lot of guardrails in.

But if you were to use a model, like an open source model that might not be as smart, that does tend to open up the risk a little bit because it just doesn’t have the intelligence like some of the frontier labs have that are able to recognize when a destructive action’s about to happen and prevent it from happening.

Typically I, if you’re an- someone new to AI, I tell them to use one of the US frontier lab models typically to get the best results. So that’s gonna be, like, ChatGPT or Claude? Yeah. Is there anything else on that list? Google is okay for just chatting, but the, the…

Google has struggled with tool calling, and I know they’ve delayed their recent model, but hopefully they’ll get that fixed soon. Grok actually just released a new model called Grok 4.5 which is apparently really good at doing these agenit- agentic task for you, so that’s another one to look into.

But typically right now the two I would look into are ChatGPT and Claude Nice. And I’d love to hear your explanation, and we can roll this into WP Vibe. How do you think or explain the difference between Claude.ai chat versus CoWork versus Code, and which one should you use with WP Vibe? Yeah all right, so yes, it’s a little confusing.

So they have this ecosystem, and basically each level gives AI a little bit more access. All right, so you have Claude.ai, and that’s a website you go to, and you talk to any of your connectors. So if you have WordPress connected via WP Vibe, you can talk to WordPress. You got Gmail, you can talk to it.

All right? So that’s level one, typically the safest level. Then you have CoWork. CoWork can run on your desktop, and what that does is it gives AI access to your local computer, but it sandboxes it. Okay? So it sits in a, a sandbox where it can’t really go outside that folder that you give it access to.

The next level is Claude Code, and think of that full computer access, just opening up the clot- floodgates, and it’s really for the power users. If you’re new, I recommend using Claude.ai, and if you connect, for example, WP Vibe at the Claude.ai level, it cascades to all the other clients like Claude CoWork and Claude Code as well.

So you can use them on any of them that you feel comfortable with. So again, I think they’re slowly merging everything in, but that’s how I look at it right now And just to be clear what’s the difference between Claude.ai versus the desktop app? I find myself kind of recommending people if they’ve been using the website to install the desktop app, ’cause it’s gonna give you some more capabilities like co-work and code and stuff.

Yeah Claude.ai only gives you access to the chat, the, the web chat. It… You don’t have… actually, I take that back. They do have a web version now of Claude Code, but you have to connect it to GitHub. Typically, I do recommend yeah, running it locally. So download the Claude app for Mac or Windows, and then the…

Right now, again, this… By the time this goes out, this might be changed, but the, the… They have two modes. They have one I think it just says Home. The other one says Code. And within the Home tab, you can chat or you can select Cowork. And then the Code tab obviously has a little bit more features. The Code tab will let y- show you Git diffs and open up a browser.

It’s a little bit oriented for coding essentially, whereas Cowork is more, like, knowledge work, kinda, non-nerd work. And then Chat is just chatting essentially. And one more piece of groundwork, let’s just talk about pricing. So Claude has the free version. When people get serious, they usually upgrade and get the $20 a month, and then- Yeah

there’s the 100 or 200 a month power user level. Yeah. And then WP Vibe has a free version, and then pro versions. Walk us through the pricing of, and what’s the best config and how are they different at the different levels? Yeah, so every… So we followed the AI labs pricing models. The difference is we don’t provide inference, and inference is basically talking to AI.

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So what I recommend most people do is ChatGPT and Claude both have free levels, and you can just chat with them as much as you want. And basically the way they get it is the more value you get from AI, they’ll start charging you. So they cap your usage. So say the free version, they might give you 20 chats.

I’m just picking a random number. And then when you hit that, they’ll say, “All right. You’re, you’ve reached your limit today. Tomorrow you can reset.” That’s exactly how WP Vibe works. So we give enough daily tool calls for you to get really the average user to, to do real work. But then if you’re, like, a freelancer, agency, or you’re powering through some stuff, then we prompt you basically to upgrade and get more tool calls per day.

Because, again, ours, even though we’re not pro- providing AI inference, we still do have a cost because we’re hosting the tool, the back end. And again, it’s just it adds to our cost. So essentially we wanted to make it just like the, the AI companies where you could test it and get real value out of it to see if that’s something you wanna continue on, and then if so, then you upgrade.

And I think a lot of people, once they touch AI and see the value they get from it, it’s kinda hard to go back really. It really is. So really, and a lot of people are probably already coming with their own $20 a month Claude or ChatGPT subscription. So you bring your own subscription- Yeah … and then wal- walk us through the setup of WP Vibe.

And then if we’re just looking at a plain WordPress site with nothing on it, what are some of the first things we should try just to play around with it and experiment? Yeah so the way it works is, In ChatGPT, we actually have a official connector. So they have a store, they can search for WP Vibe and hit connect, and it will walk them through the process.

So let me give you an idea of the process. In Claude, you have to add a com- a custom connector, but that is basically putting in a MCP URL, and you hit connect. From there, what happens is it sends you to our website and you basically authenticate. So we’re just trying to figure out, are you the person you say you are?

We send you a, a code, a one-time code. You enter that, and you’re authenticated with our connector, okay? So at this point, you can add any number of WordPress sites, and the way you add a WordPress site is you just say simply connect seedprod.com for example, and it will call out to that site, and it will…

Actually, let me back up real quick. We do have a plugin we offer as well on the wordpress.org site. It’s not required, but it does give you a lot more functionality. But what happens after you add the site, it calls your WordPress site, and it- and WordPress has a built-in authentic- authentication system which talks back to our MCP and then authenticates the site.

So there’s no credentials we see. We encrypt everything, and at that point you’re actually connected. I can share my screen and show you, but I don’t know if we wanna go that far. But that’s essentially the flow. Yeah, we can do if you’re listening on the podcast, go to the LMScast website and you’ll see the YouTube version of this, if you wanna give us a little quick demo of that.

Sure. So let me look at the… How do I share my screen here? It’s at the bottom. There’s a plus- Okay … I think. And then I might have to bring it up once you authorize it

All right So I’ll pull it up. Just let me know when you want me to pull it down. Okay All right. This is, for example, we’re connected to testing.seedprod.com. Okay? So the way I do that is let me remove this. Okay. Can you remove testing.seedprod.com? I’m gonna reconnect it to show everyone how we connect the website.

All right. So again, it’s … A lot of people type, and one hint I’ll give you is get a voice a voice-to-text agent, because what that will do is save you a lot of different keystrokes, and it’s so fast. Do you use that, Chris? Do you use it any- I use Whisper Flow. Okay. I use something called Super Whisper.

Again there’s tons of them out there. All right. So it’s removed it okay, let’s reconnect to testing.seedprod.com. So again, I’m… While it’s doing that, I’m gonna show you up here in my connectors, I have WP Vibe connected, and you can see it here. Okay? Now, the way you do that is you just go hit add, add custom connector, and our website has this URL you put in here.

So let’s go back here. All right, so now-

All right, so I’m just authenticating on my app. I’m actually gonna… Oh, I don’t have my

Let me open up my browser real quick because- I just stopped sharing in case you were typing in your password or whatever. No, I’ve got this is a testing site. I just- Okay … I couldn’t remember

All right. All right, so we’re back here, and then I just click… Oh are you sharing again, Chris? Yeah, we’re back. All right. We just hit approve this site. All right, and we’re connected. So now I can say, “All right, tell me about this website. What plugins are installed?” And while it’s doing that, I’m just gonna go back to the site here and pull it up

All right, so here’s a website, and it’s connecting to our site, and it’s telling us what plugins are installed. Now, what’s cool is we actually just pushed out a widget, and it has some things that you can try on your website. So it’ll detect your plugins. So right now it knows we have Lifter installed, so it’s like, “Enroll students in your course, build an online course.”

And you can just copy these prompts and paste them in and it’ll do it for you. Okay? But so Here we go. It’s showing our plugins. And again, when you’re talking to AI, it’ll do anything that you can do on a website. For example, we have four updates. We’ll just say, “Okay, can you update the four plugins that need to be updated?”

All right. So essentially, anything you need to do on your WordPress website, WPVibe can do. We can make posts, we can run audits, security audits, we can run SEO audits, we can update plugins, we can create a new theme. Just you name it, it can do it. Is there anything you’re interested in seeing, Chris, or? I’m interested in all of it.

And I just wa- I just wanna say you had a you have a saying, as AI keeps getting better, a lot of the dashboards and menu clicks fade into the background. So this is like a conversational interface with your WordPress site without clicking add new and… ‘Cause in the past, we would do a lot of copying and pasting from ChatGPT if you’re trying to write a blog post in ChatGPT, but this is actually, you can just talk directly to your website, which is- Right

really amazing. Yeah, e- exactly. And also, what you can do is, All right, so it, right here, it said one of the, the plugins had an error updating. So it’s it’s smart . It knows what is actually going on here. And then, so this is CloudCode, and it has a built-in browser here. But if you’re on the website, so we’re on the website right here, as things are updating, we actually have a live reload thing that pops up here and helps you see what’s going on in your with your website.

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So whenever you’re on your website, like you can tell it to navigate to a different part of your website, and this will actually update for you. So it’s just a complete unified experience. That’s awesome. And I just wanna… Maybe you could help expand on what I’m gonna say. For a Lifter example, if you do a Google search for LifterLMS, there’s a a LifterLMS MCP.

You’ll see all the abilities. So for courses, there’s things like list courses, get course, update course, get course content create lessons all the money stuff like list access plans, create access plan, list students, update student, enroll student, and all this, and there’s many more. So explain how the benefits of this compare to clicking around and trying to do it all manually on your WordPress site.

The biggest thing is it’s a lot faster here. Is there something that really takes a long time in Lifter that we could maybe test? So I have a, a, a course here, or a test course. Is there anything in particular you wanna test here? I’m… Right now I’m just having it lift out, or list out all the Lifter abilities.

Maybe just adding some- It says, “Lifter doesn’t have any roaster abilities.” Maybe- Let me see here. What version of Lifter has the abilities? We’re on 10.1 or something like that. Okay. we have a REST API

Let’s see here. Okay, are you sure? Check it again and see. Is it, is the REST API the only thing you have access to?

So I’m gonna open this up a little bit here so we can see it

I’ll put a a comment here in StreamYard that goes to the LifterLMS MCP thing on GitHub. Okay. And again, the, the Abilities API is pretty new, so- Yeah … i- i, there, there might be some il- issues with it just discovering. Here’s what we found here. So we found just these here. So I can look into this more on the Abilities and see why it’s not recognizing it.

But we do have the REST API, so we can do stuff there. Nice. And also what we do- Yeah … Chris, is another thing, is a lot of… Okay, so le- let’s explain what the Abilities API is first. So the Ability API is WordPress core’s answer to expose functionality to AI clients, okay? So as you can see here, we do have a REST API where we can modify stuff, but the Abilities API goes a step further and helps unify what an agent sees versus what it can do.

Now, since this is new and a lot of stuff coming out doesn’t have the Abilities API, we also ship a WP-CLI emulator. So we ship primitives because essentially everything on WordPress is either in the database or on the theme. So we can touch any parts of WordPress, even if a plugin doesn’t ship with a specific AP- Abilities API functionality, if that makes sense.

If not, I can explain it a little bit more. That’s very cool. Expand. So essentially i- imagine that you have an SEO plugin and it has no Abilities API. What AI will do is it will look at our database, say, “Oh, this is how it stores all its meta titles and descriptions. I’ll just update these directly.”

Okay. And it’ll update them, say, if you’re doing a SEO au- O audit on your website. And what happens here is we actually have built-in gates. So the biggest thing is people are scared of letting AI touch their site. But if we do something destructive, it will actually prompt us and tell us, “You can’t do it unless you agree to do it.”

So let’s try it here. Okay, can you create create a user, and then I wanna delete that user so I can demonstrate how our gates work, our permission gates? So Chris, if you’re working on, for example, your courses with Lifter and you’re wanting to do cleanups, basically our philosophy is if anything has a trash or is not, is non-destructive, then we let it flow.

If not, then we prompt the user to agree to take a destructive action. So if you’re… okay, so you can see it doing stuff right here and saying refresh because it’s creating the user and stuff. So essentially what happens is, i- if it’s gonna delete something, it’s gonna prompt you and tell you, “Hey, I can’t delete this unless you agree.”

We wanna make it as safe as pop- possible for people to get work done on their website, but not destroy their website in the process. That is super cool. All right, so here’s the approval gate loading right now And this is an approval gate to delete a user? Yeah. Yeah. And it tells you exactly what it’s gonna do, but this would show up for anything that is non-reversible ex- essentially, like deleting a plugin, deleting a course.

Anything like this would show up. And then we have a session thing. So if you don’t wanna keep doing this and cl- keep clicking approve and execute, you can set a session variable where it’ll just do it once and then freely continue to do stuff. Okay? So we’ll execute that, and it’ll run it, and we’ll push it here and say, “I approved it,” and it’ll just check it and say, “Oh, this, this user was removed.”

I’m thinking of a real-world use case where some people use LMSs to just train people at a company. And let’s say they just set it up and they wanna add, create these 200 users and enroll them in a certain course or membership or whatever. Yeah. They could… That HR person could do all that from Claude without, having to figure out how to import users into WordPress.

I’m imagining you could give it a CSV of email addresses and names or whatever and just- Yeah … say go. Absolutely. So let’s try it real quick. What’s an example course? I won’t have it build out the whole thing, it’ll take too long, but I’ll just for this demo, like- just safety training.

Okay. So I wanna demo building a course on LifterLMS. Just make a simple safety training course like your typical HR person would create. I wanna make this as quick as possible, just so don’t build out ribose, robust or verbose courses. Create it and then let me know what you’ve done. All right.

So we’ll let that build out here. And so first of all, typically what they would do is build the course, and then, Chris, I guess the next thing is, they would do is enroll people in that course. Is that correct? That would be the next thing. Okay. So we’ll let this build out. And the biggest thing is what they’d wanna do is obviously curate this course a little bit more or, the, the average user might even talk to Claude and say, “You know what?

I don’t e- what do, what should this course even look like?” And that’s the big thing with AI, like it is an amazing brainstorming partner. Yeah. So imagine if I was an HR person I could actually chat with the AI and say, “All right. I work in HR. W- we’re a construction company. We build commercial properties.

I’m trying to build a safety course. Can you help me plan this out?” And it would actually plan it out for you and then implement it, which is absolutely amazing. And we can do something like that as well once, once this kind of builds out if you want to, but I’ll let you decide how, h- what direction we go.

I think that’s super cool. The, the concept really is like the speed of iteration, like the brainstorming and okay, you create version one, but you’re not 100% happy. Just keep iterating. Yeah. And that’s never been faster. Yes. I don’t know about you, but with the voice to like the whisper flow and the one you use- Yeah

I’m 10 times faster. I’m already a slow typer. Yeah. And it’s that, that efficiency right there, and then AI speeding up, now I get impatient waiting the like minute or two for Claude to do its thing, but hey- Yeah … you’re still going a thousand times faster than you used to, right? Yeah. And, once you get the hang of this, you can actually just open up another session while this is running and continue to work on it.

So this one actually has a thing here that’ll let you know when it needs input. It’s a little overwhelming at first, but once you get the hang of it, like you can run two or three of these chat sessions and really get a lot of work done very fast. So here’s our course right here, the worst workplace safety essentials it created.

And, again, we didn’t fill out a lot of the content of it. It’s more of a skeleton here. But, that, we did that what, in a, a matter of seconds, right? So again, let’s just… I wanna give people kind of a brainstorming session because I think it’s a thing people overlook a lot of times.

All right, so let me just… Okay, so I’m actually new in HR, and again, this is demo. How- what would this course look like, you think? All right. And it would… You can go back and forth with it, and then it will update your course for you, right? And then we’re like, w- if we had a list of s- people, we could just upload it to this chat and it would add the users and enroll them in the course for us.

How much does the, the person have to think about multi-step processes? For example, if you give a bunch of users, it’s really create a user in WordPress, step one. Step two, enroll them in this course. Yeah. Do you have to know the chain of tags? Or- N- no, not at all. So I’ll create some users here in just a second.

Especially with the smarter models, so as I was saying here the, the smarter model you use, the better it’s gonna do without giving it explicit instructions, okay? If you use kind of a smaller model like Hoo- Haiku, you might have to tell it, “All right create a user, add it to this course specifically.”

But the smarter models like the Frontier models the labs are releasing, you can just tell it to add a user and it knows what to do essentially. Yeah. Yeah, there’s that saying, and this is why I wanna just compel with some urgency, is like we’re always working with the worst version of AI. It gets better every day, every week.

So if you’re not on the train, it’s time to, do some learning. And I’ve found that you just have to experiment and just play with it for a day, a weekend, a week, a month, 60 days, and y- you’ll be shocked. And the thing is it’s going so fast that the time to start learning tools like WP Vibe and how AI interacts with WordPress is of the essence, ’cause it’s just gonna get faster and better, and as- Yeah

there’s no better time to start learning. Yeah. If you’re, if you’re- yeah. You want to get in right now because the quicker you get in, the quicker you realize the advantage you have over people that haven’t learned this skill yet. And just, whatever you’re trying to achieve, you can move a- at least 10X faster is what I’ve seen, it is quite amazing and yeah, chatting with it and just putting in those reps is the best advice. And one way I like to describe AI is that it’s kinda like an actor and you’re the director, so you can basically tell it or direct it however you want to do. But one thing is sometimes it can go off script, someki- sometimes it can ad-lib and make up stuff.

So you just need to be aware of that and be aware of, the capabilities versus the restraints as well w- this is trying to take screenshots of this, so I’m gonna stop it here and I’m just gonna say, “Okay, can you just add some test users? May- maybe add three test users.” So again, I’m not telling it specifically how to do it.

It should add it to that course. We’ll see. I actually, I just said add test user, so it might not add it to that course. It might just add the users, but again, you’re, you need to kinda watch it and, be as specific as you think you need to be essentially. One thing I love about AI recently is that it almost anticipates your next step.

So it might even prompt you here “Hey, do you want me to enroll them in the course?” Or- Yeah … it’ll give you like three o- options and then say which one it recommends and stuff like that. It’s re- it’s becoming more and more proactive, which is amazing. Yeah. Yeah. So it’s, it is crazy because, yeah, they will come back and…

All right, so this one actually says, “Not enrolled anything.” So then you would just say, “Yep let’s enroll them,” add them to the course, whatever you need to do. And again, this versus just clicking around here, again, once you experience kind of this magic, it’s hard to go back and start clicking around in the dashboard.

I still do occasionally, but the more and more, I’m just talking to AI and telling it what to do. Now, the cool thing also about WPVibe is we have skills. So if anybody has heard of skills, so they’re essentially like knowledge base, like how to do stuff, okay? And we load a variety of skills built in, so we actually have a recipe book on WPVibe to AI for tons of different plugins.

Like we have over 100 something skills right now. But you can make your own skills as well. So imagine you keep doing the same thing over and over again, you can create a skill and recall it in the future. So I’ll just say, “Okay, so I wanna demonstrate our skills. What is a skill someone working on a course would typically need that is a repeat process?

Can we save that as a custom skill?” So what this will do, again, you wanna tell it what you wanna do, but this will save a custom skill, and then you can recall it in the future. So say that need to, I don’t know, add attr- attribution to videos or images or something every time you create a course, it will do that for you.

You just say, “Run skill X,” and it will do it for you. Does that make sense? That makes sense. A question on that. At LifterLMS we have a, a fancy AI agent that’s super custom with tons of skills and stuff that we just use internally at our company. But one of the, just you can come up with all these fun projects.

Similar to you, I’ve been around WordPress for a very long time, and my website is very old. Yeah. So I asked the AI, “How many images do we have that don’t have alt text?” Which is bad for SEO- Yeah … and accessibility. And then our agent found them. It built a little test area where we could review it writing the images.

We gave it some of our top SEO terms and told it not just to put it in everything, but when it made sense. And then it basically executed across 7,000 images in 10 minutes. Yeah. And fixed a problem we’ve had for a long time that would have taken a human at least a month to figure out and do. Yeah. Yeah, it’s quite amazing.

And that’s where we’re going with WPVibe. So right now we just shipped the ability… So Google has an audit tool called Lighthouse. Yeah. And it lets you run speed audits, accessibility audits, and o- other audits on your website. So we’ve built that into WPVibe, and soon we’ll be adding GA4 and Google Search Console.

So essentially everything’s together. So it can look at Google Search Console, look at articles that maybe need a little tweaking. It could tweak that article and then help bump it up in the rankings for you. Or, y- anything you can think of where you need that context, like analytics or r- query rankings in Google, it can pull all that together and take out that step of you going to Google Search Console or Google Analytics and taking that data and pasting it in here.

What’s an example, I think an SEO project, whether somebody’s using all-in-one SEO or something else- … that it’s like one of those areas where people wanna experiment and learn first. Yeah. What’s an… Maybe expand a little bit on, like, how somebody who wants to do their first SEO project with WP Vibe, what kind of project would they do?

So the, the first thing I would do is I would just say right here, I would just say, “Okay thank you for creating this skill. Let’s just do a simple SEO audit of these courses. What do you recommend for the meta title and description?” And it will look at the courses, the content, and sub- and recommend SEO titles and descriptions.

We actually have a skill called SEO Audit, and it will do a lightweight pass across your entire website and look for things like H1 tags, alt tags missing, again, your meta ti- meta title and descriptions, and it will recommend things for you. And actually this is using Lighthouse. So if you remember, I told you we had some of the Google tools built in.

It decided to use the Lighthouse tool to do the, the SEO audit here

That’s amazing. And again I know it takes a little while ’cause you gotta wait on this stuff here to run the tools here, but it should come back with recommendations on what to do, and then again, you just say, “Do it or don’t do it.” And another thing I like to do is what these agents can do is spin up sub-agents.

Yeah. So are you familiar with sub-agents, Chris? Yep. Okay. So what that essentially does is it spins up another copy of itself. So if you’re not sure about something or you think something doesn’t sound right, you can say, “Spin up an adversarial sub-agent to review these findings.” And what it will do is it will spin up another agent, pass in its findings, and basically look for gaps or blind spots That’s awesome Yeah, so it’ll almost check itself.

So here we go. This just came back with a bunch of stuff here. So pages blocking from… This is a test site, so public blog is set to zero. That’s the stuff you might have even forgot about, right? … “Oh, I turned this, this site off. I discouraged search engines from checking it.” And then a- again, it’s got title and descriptions and, we could have it update these for us.

So yeah it’s quite amazing and I think that th- this is just the way we’re gonna be interacting with WordPress in the future. It reminds me of the early days of WordPress, ’cause unlike John, I’m not a developer, but when I found WordPress, I was able to build websites and basically solve business challenges as a agency owner, and WordPress democratized website building for people like me.

And now I see this next wave of AI really doing that for WordPress again at a, in a different way with speed and going outside your skill set with code and things like that, that the AI just does for you. Yeah. Yeah. It’s amazing. And again, the more tools you give it, the more power it will see. So like I said, this one just ran the Lighthouse audit tool.

A few other tools we ship is we ship a, a, a image search tool. So say you want a image for your course, we can just say, “All right. Can you find a image for this course and apply it?” So we’ll try that. Okay. On the Workplace Safety Essentials course, can you find an image and apply as a featured image?

We have a code snippets tool, so it can create any code snippet you can think of to push out on your site. So just the, the possibilities are limitless, and what we focus on at WP vibe is giving it primitives. So primitives are, again, like access to basically what a developer would have. So WP Vibe can almost act like a developer for you and do that stuff that you might not know about, Chris, not being a developer, but- AI certainly does know how to do it and knows how to apply it I think one example, I’m just thinking back to my early agency days is when somebody wants to ins- they’re gonna run Facebook ads and they wanna install a tracking pixel.

AI could just do it for you instead of having to get a developer to be like, “Hey, I need to put this pixel wherever it’s supposed to go, and I don’t understand the Facebook developer pixel documentation.” Yeah, absolutely. It can do it for you, and then you can even use a Facebook connector if they have one, and you can close that gap as well.

So not only can it set up the pixel, but it can see your ads and then help you adjust and modify those. For the general education, I think the i- the key idea here is context. The more context you give your AI “Oh, I can see your Google Analytics, I can see your WordPress site, I can make changes. I can see your email or whatever else,” you’re just providing so much more context.

‘Cause just chatting with AI and the large language model is cool, but this whole thing, by giving it all this context about your website and your business and what you’re trying to do and the tools you use and the analytics you use- … it just, it’s like a whole nother level than just chatting and copying and pasting things.

It absolutely is. And, just to go back to what we were working on. So it found this image. It… do your courses have a featured image place? They do. All right. So let’s see if it applied it. If I go to here to course, it said it applied it here. Do I just click edit or where would I see that at?

View. Okay, view. Oh, yeah, there it is So yeah, it just found an image for us, added it, and, done. So pretty amazing. I got… I have two more questions for you, John, two more quick areas to explore. One is design. Yeah. We’re doing a lot with functionality and adding users and stuff. Themes have really changed in WordPress, and now there’s full site editing and Gutenberg and everything.

Yeah. How… What kind of design things, or what would be good first design related projects that you could do with WPVibe connected to your WordPress site? Yeah I’m glad you brought this up. So essentially, there’s lots of different ways to apply des- design to a WordPress site. So if you actually go to WPVibe.ai, we built this entire site with WPVibe, and we have a video on our YouTube channel.

So if you go down here to the bottom and click on YouTube you can see this video of how we built our website with AI, and we approached it a little bit different. So this entire website took me about an hour and a half to build, and it’s very robust. It has it has a recipes generator. It’s got all this stuff, and then I can edit it just by talking to WPVibe.

WordPress has full site editing built in, okay? And it uses Gutenberg. Now, what we have found is AI typically struggles with Gutenberg, and the reason is that it is so verbose. So if you look at how Gutenberg is generated for you non-technical people, it creates basically a big wall of text to create a heading or something like that, okay?

And AI has to figure out what this text means and then how to edit it. And not only that, with full site editing, you can make changes in the block. You can make changes at the site level. You can add custom CSS. So it has all these different things it’s trying to figure out how this one title is being rendered or the custom CSS behind it.

And it’s not only Gutenberg. Elementor CProd, the plugin I, I build, the page building plugins, it has to infer all this. Now, the good news is it can still work. It just won’t be as complex. So it’ll be more of a basic site. Like trying to do something like this, it would struggle with. But if you want to build like super complex sites where you take, you vibe code like HTML and have it render it that, what we have found is classic themes are the best way to do it.

And that’s the way WP Vibe works, is it will generate a classic theme, and for those who are not familiar before full site editing WordPress, you would just create a theme with code and it would display for you. AI is super good at reading the file system and editing code, and we have found that is the best way to build themes with AI.

Again, if you’re not technical, we also ship with WP Vibe something called AI custom fields. So you can tell it, “I want this to be editable,” and this will turn this into a custom field that you can change on the back end. And again, if you watch that video, it goes into a little more details on the why, but you can see exactly how we built this.

But as the models continue to get better and more robust, it is unlocking a lot of the full site editing. It’s getting better at it, and it’s making less mistakes. So I think it will get there eventually, but right now it does struggle. Again, it can create small things, but if you’re like just build out the entire website, typically it- you’ll have more errors or frustration than going with like the classic the- theme way.

And in your case, you didn’t modify an existing classic theme. You created a brand new one. Yes. Is that correct? Just by talking. Just by talking, and again- It- … I didn’t tell it to create a cla- classic theme. I just said, “Hey, I wanna build a n- a WordPress website,” and I told it what I wanted, and it chose how to do it.

We tell it how to do it on the back end because we know that this works best, but it will just do it for us and create a test site and go from there. I could demo it, but it does take a little bit longer to build out a th- a site because it’s generating a lots of code.

Last question for you, John. How should an agency owner or a freelancer think about this? What are the biggest benefits? Obviously, there’s a speed increase in the ability to implement and perhaps offer services that are they didn’t offer before, ’cause now they can do an SEO audit as an example.

Yeah, so- But, like, how, what would what’s in it for agencies and freelancers? So yeah, I think if they want to free up more of their time and offer more robust services to their clients, then they want to start leveraging AI right now. So we actually just got a review the other day, and I thought it was pretty cool because this is a agency person and he said, I tried several tools like this, but this beats them all.”

And, he maintains 50-plus sites, and I think that, with WPVibe, we can add as many sites as we wanna add. Right now I have four or five sites. Can you list all the sites I have connected? But imagine you have something you need to do on every site, like update plugins. We can say, “Can you update plugins on all of my sites?”

And it would do it for you while you’re out taking a walk or something, right? And, I think agencies are gonna wanna start offering this ability to clients as well, and that’s something we have planned for WPVibe, where you can add clients to your account so they can edit their sites as well.

And what’s cool about AI is you can actually say, “Hey, this client should only have access to the about page or the contact page,” and then it will prevent them from editing other parts of the website. So there’s a safety layer built into it as well. Ultimately, we wanna get to the point where you’re talking to AI just like emailing a developer.

But instead of emailing developer, you’re talking to AI and it’s doing the work for you. That is so cool. So in your view, I’m gonna pull the screen share down and we’ll land the plane here, is Okay … what do you see as the future of page builders? This feels like the next evolution of page building, just doing it through AI, right?

Or- Yeah … what do you think about that? You even have CProd, which I think has 800,000 installs or something, and it’s a page builder, and it comes- Yeah … in the same thing. So you’re the guy with b- on both sides of the story, so how do you see- wordPress, last I checked, was like 43% of the web, right?

Millions of sites, millions and millions of sites. Not all those sites are gonna start fresh and create a new site or a theme. So that is actually our goal. We want, at WPVIWe want to provide a first-class AI experience, no matter you have a legacy site or building a new site. All those, we want to meet you where you’re at.

So we actually just shipped Elementor V4 skills. So now when you’re working on Elementor site, we understand how V4 works. We can make changes to you, to the site for you, and it will show up in work. And again, like I said, it does work right now, but it’s not 100% like it is when you’re building like a classic theme.

The, the… It’s more error-prone, let’s just put it that way. But we try to solve that with our MCP, but whenever we get an error, we actually feed it back into the AI so it can understand from its mistakes and it won’t try it again. So that’s one thing we actually have a upper hand on because WordPress ships with the ability to connect like an API key to WordPress.

And again, it’s two different methods for talking to your WordPress site with AI. We believe people will want to use their agent of choice as opposed to an ad hoc API key, ’cause first of all, you have to pay extra for that. You don’t get to use your subscription with an API key. And then you run the risk of having a A- API key exposed, right?

So essentially, what we wanna do is we want to, whatever WordPress site you have, whether it’s old, you’re running old plugins, we want to be able to use our AI to manage and not only manage it but do a, a, a great job at managing that website and helping you save time with it. My mind is blown, John.

Thank you for this. Awesome, Chris. And I wanna encourage all you out there listening and watching to go to wpvibe.ai. Try the free version, fall in love with it, and then get on the pro version. I’m looking forward to experimenting with it more, and this pla- this, this thing is moving fast. Like- Yes

three months from now, who knows? Yes. So this is the time to learn and get started with all this stuff. Absolutely. Now is the time. And it’s actually quite fun once you get into it, it is fun. Yeah. Particularly when you unlock the talking thing. Yeah. And and as you get better, like you said, sometimes you’ll s- all right it’s doing this, it’s creating this course.

While it’s creating the course, I’m gonna do this other thing and then- Yeah … start another one, and it… I don’t know, the productivity is just insane. Absolutely. Yes, it is. Yeah. All right, John thanks for coming on the show. Go to wpvibe.ai. Also, subscribe to the WPVibe AI channel. I saw your videos come up and I see tons of tech videos, but then I saw yours and I’m like, “Yes, this is WordPress and AI.

This is like-” Yeah … “so fun.” And you’re really leading through the space, so it’s awesome to see. Keep up the amazing work. Yeah. And thank you for coming on the show. Oh, thank you for having me, Chris. It’s been awesome.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMScast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS.com/gift. Go to LifterLMS.com/gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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Chris Badgett discusses six useful and very successful methods for improving the online course and membership website checkout process in this LMScast episode.

According to him, checkout optimization is one of the most effective ways to boost income without boosting marketing expenditures because around 70% of visitors who reach the checkout page never finish their transaction. Chris starts off by emphasizing the effectiveness of cart abandonment recovery and demonstrating how automated follow-up emails may entice prospective buyers to finish their purchase. Based on LifterLMS’s personal experience, he discloses that this tactic has recovered almost $319,000 in lost revenue, illustrating how even a minor increase in checkout conversions may have a big effect on business expansion.

Chris also highlights how crucial it is to create a frictionless checkout process by eliminating extraneous form fields and requesting that clients just enter the information necessary to finish their transaction. He discusses how eliminating unnecessary steps makes it simpler for customers to complete the checkout process while still enabling companies to use customisable options to gather more data as needed. He suggests including testimonials, user reviews, trust indicators, and social proof straight on the checkout page to further boost consumer confidence and convince them that they are making the correct choice.

To further improve customer confidence and persuade them that they are making the right decision, he recommends including testimonials, user reviews, trust indicators, and social proof directly on the checkout page.He suggests putting testimonials, user reviews, trust indicators, and social proof right on the checkout page to boost client confidence and convince them they are making the correct choice.

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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.

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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 What’s going on? It’s Chris from LifterLMS, and today we’re gonna go into how to optimize your checkout for courses and memberships regardless of which tool you’re using, because the surprising statistic is that nearly seven out of 10 people abandon your checkout And never return. So today, I wanna show you six ways on how to fix that.

So if seven out of ten people reach your checkout and never finish, that’s a huge missed opportunity. The things that most people don’t realize about conversion optimization is in certain places, if you can just make a little bit of improvement, it can literally double your business or have a dramatic impact.

The checkout is one of those places, so just having a slight increase could cause a lot of new revenue for you, particularly if your course or membership is a high value or a high price point course or membership. So definitely pay attention in this em- episode. I’m gonna go over six tactical specific ways to improve your checkout so that you can uncover lost revenue that’s literally just sitting there.

You just gotta pull a few levers, and I’m gonna go over six of those levers today. The first is that you wanna recover lost checkouts. A lot of people don’t think about this, but if seven out of ten people abandon your checkout, those seven people, or 70%, could come back and buy from you. You’re not gonna get all seven, but even just getting one or two of them has a dramatic impact of your business.

So the checkout page is the highest leverage page where your prospect has already raised their hand. They said, “I’m interested in their product.” They know what the price is, and they’re all the way at the checkout, and then they leave. So how do you do cart abandonment recovery? This is something that we’ve been doing for a very long time.

We’ve done cart abandonment recovery at LifterLMS for about seven years now. And just for our software sales site, we have recovered $319,000 just through implementing the same cart abandonment recovery system that I’m gonna describe to you here today. I’m not just gonna describe it to you, I’m also gonna show you exactly how you can do it and just install an add-on, click to activate, and it’s on if you’re using LifterLMS for your courses and memberships.

So basically, the way cart abandonment works is when somebody leaves your checkout Cart abandonment needs them to take an action like entering their email address to actually know who they are. So a lot of cart abandonment actually doesn’t happen when they first visit the cart. They often enter their name, enter their email, maybe the phone rings, maybe they’re having second thoughts, maybe another screen goes off with something else and they lose focus and they just abandon your cart.

But the way cart abandonment works, once you have their email. Is it gets dropped into a cart abandonment recovery system, which I’m gonna describe for you here today. But before I do, just so you know, LifterLMS recently released a new add-on into our Infinity bundle. Or I’m sorry, it’s actually in all bundles, so it’s also included in the Earth bundle. Which is our lowest price bundle that has our payment gateways and all the e-commerce stuff in it, and it is included in all plans.

So that is a new add-on, and everything I’m gonna describe to you here, all you have to do is install the add-on, activate it, turn it on, and it’s gonna start working right away. And just in case you missed it when I said it earlier, the system that we use at LifterLMS on our software sales site, we use a very similar methodology for the LifterLMS add-on.

So basically, the way it works, somebody enters their email address, and then they abandon your cart, and then they’re gone. But what does the cart abandonment recovery system do in the background? The key thing is it’s gonna send three strategic emails and each email does a different job. So basically what it does is the first email fires one hour later and says, “Hey, it looks like you abandoned your cart.

Do you wanna complete your checkout? Did something go wrong?” And there’s a big button that says, “Return to my cart. Return to my checkout.” And so when somebody clicks on that, they’re not just going back to your website, they’re actually going to the cart they had loaded up, and all they have to do is complete the form that they already started and complete their checkout The next email fires 24 hours later.

So this is really important, like the cadence. So basically, email one is one hour later, email two is one day later, and email three is three days later. So email one is “Hey, did something go wrong? Come back.” Email two follows up and is “Hey, we noticed you didn’t complete your checkout.

These are the benefits of the product. Are you sure you’re not interested in moving forward with our product?” Again, there’s a big button, Return to Checkout. Then what happens at email three is that there is a different system which basically gives you an opportunity to apply a limited time offer or expiring coupon code that’s good for seventy-two hours for somebody to not only complete their checkout, but also get a discount.

So this is your last shot, your Hail Mary last chance to close that sale. We’re not gonna follow up with this person forever. Cart abandonment is like a period in time over three days, and that final email basically with the LifterLMS cart abandonment recovery add-on, what it does is it automatically generates that unique, expiring coupon code that’s just good for that user, creates the custom email, sends it to them.

In our experience, the majority of cart abandonment recovery that happen with that first email. But the other two emails, the one day later or the seventy-two hours later also adds revenue. But even just that first email contributed… in our case, out of the three hundred and twenty thousand dollars, it contributed two hundred thousand dollars of that three hundred and twenty thousand dollars in terms of recovery.

The other cool thing about cart abandonment recovery, once you turn it on, you kinda forget about it, and you just keep track of your sales and everything. But we actually have at LifterLMS reporting that shows you your number of abandoned carts, the amount of carts recovered, the revenue, and there’s actually a weekly summary digest email, so you can keep track of that over time.

So that is in the Earth bundle, our lowest cost plan at LifterLMS, ’cause we love to help course creators and membership creators, coaches, education entrepreneurs, build successful businesses, and cart abandonment recovery is a huge opportunity. So that cart abandonment recovery is my number one tip for r-recovering lost sales.

The next six or five tips I’m gonna give you on your checkout optimization Are more about creating higher conversion on the checkout you already have. It’s basically getting people to complete the cart they already have. Not necessarily recover ones that are lost. So the first thing that’s important in checkout in terms of conversion optimization is reducing the number of fields at checkout.

So what do I mean by fields? Fields are the little boxes that people type in information when they’re completing an enrollment in your course or your membership. So the cool thing about LifterLMS is we have a form fields manager for your checkout fields. So the basic thing you wanna do is, particularly if you have a digital program, is to remove the address field.

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So if you’re not shipping anything, if you don’t know- need to know where people live or what their address is, go ahead and remove that field. Basically, the way this works is on a checkout, you want people to have to do as little amount of work as possible to pay you, so there’s no point in asking for their physical address if you don’t need it.

So you can reduce those fields and increase your conversion rate on your checkout. The other cool thing too is LifterLMS has a add-on called Custom Fields, so if you need to collect some kind of custom information or custom data, like company name as an example, you can create your own custom field at checkout.

But if you wanna do the absolute minimum, what I recommend is email address, password, and that’s it. That’s the most conversion-optimized checkout field situation. However, if you need to collect more information, like company name, or you need their phone number, or you need their physical address, you can of course add those.

But best practices in conversion optimization, whether somebody’s opting in or enrolling in something for free, or if it’s a paid program, is to limit the number of fields. And if you’re doing a paid program, keep in mind You’re not just asking for their first name, last name, email address, desired password for their account, and so on.

They also have to enter their credit card, the year of expiry, the three-digit code on the back, and so on. So the amount that we can reduce those fields and the amount of work somebody has to do to buy your products and programs, the better. So keep that in mind. And one more pro tip for you, LifterLMS, as an example, has places where y- people confirm their email address they have to type it in a second time to make sure there wasn’t a spelling error, and so on.

You can remove those confirmation steps if you want to, which in general I actually recommend doing just to limit that extra step from the checkout. But if you wanna make absolutely certain that somebody entered the correct email address or type their password a second time to make sure they’re not gonna make an error later, you can turn those features on.

But I recommend turning those off so the confirmation step is not required. Which streamlines the checkout and it removes all that friction from the checkout. My third tip for you is to add social proof to your checkout. So what do I mean by that is trust is everything in checkout. If you’ve done the work, if you’ve built a great product, if you’ve built a strong company brand, personal brand, you’re gonna come with that trust in spades.

People aren’t gonna care, they’re just gonna buy your stuff. But particularly if you’re working with colder audiences who don’t know you, don’t necessarily trust you, I definitely recommend sprinkling in some social proof onto your checkout page. So on WordPress as an example the checkout from Lifter is embedded. It’s a block, it’s a short code, it’s a content area that’s its own thing, and it sticks into a page, i.e.,

your checkout page. But what some people don’t realize is they can add content above and/or below the actual checkout experience. So definitely below, and even in cases above, I recommend adding a key testimonial, maybe mention of the reviews you have “Oh, we have, 4.9 stars on Trustpilot across 300 people.”

Or most importantly, I think a targeted testimonial that speaks to the return on investment, whether that’s time or money in the program, is a great thing to add below the checkout, which means it’s right below the moment they’re gonna click the button and do their checkout. So before they’ve entered their stuff and they’re j- they’re on the last, fence to jump before becoming a customer, and they just look right below that button and you can see a very strong testimonial, ideally from someone That your buyer might know or be aware of, maybe a micro-celebrity or influencer and that sort of thing.

And that stuff really helps boost your conversion optimization by injecting social proof. So you should have social proof throughout your site. You don’t have to go overboard with it, but it’s definitely helpful to sprinkle testimonials on your homepage, on your about page, on your checkout page, on your courses and membership sales pages as well.

And by the way, with LifterLMS, there’s an easy button called Aircraft, which is our page builder for modern WordPress. It includes pre-done patterns, and we have several testimonial patterns for inserting a strong testimonial or a grid of testimonials or some trust logos like Trusted by and all that stuff.

So that’s all included in the Aircraft page builder, which works with any modern WordPress theme, not just our theme, Sky Pilot The next thing I wanna help you optimize your checkout with, and this is another very powerful way to keep the checkout and prevent the abandonment, is what’s called an exit-intent pop-up.

So I wanna give a nod to our podcast sponsor, Popup Maker, a great friend of the show from Code Atlantic. WPpopuppmaker.com, go check it out. But basically the way exit intent works is when somebody goes to your checkout page, and let’s say they enter their email, or they don’t, and they’re going to abandon, which means they move their cursor up to the top corner as if they’re gonna navigate away in the browser.

Popup Maker will detect that. That’s called an exit intent, and it gives you a trigger that you can have a pop-up pop up on the screen. So what can you do with that pop-up? Basically you’re stopping the immediate exit so that they have to take an action. And when this is done well, it’s really not annoying.

If somebody wants to leave, they can just click the X, close it, and leave. But what do you do in that message? You have a pop-up as somebody is abandoning your cart. There’s three main things you can do. The first thing you can do is just confirm the value of what you’re delivering. So you could say something like, “Are you sure you wanna leave?

You were just about to get the best course about XYZ. Close this now and complete your checkout. If not, no hard feelings, we’ll see you back another day.” So that’s number one, which is confirming the value. Number two, what you can do is you can try to use another conversion optimization technique, which I call the coupon close.

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So what a coupon close is somebody went to buy your product, let’s say it’s $1,000, and they’re abandoning the checkout. They may or may not have given you the email address and you have one chance to try to save this sale. So what you can do here is you can offer a fast action coupon. And the way this works is- You can provide a coupon code, let’s say, for a 10% discount so they can save $100 if they go ahead and complete their purchase.

Of all the three, I actually recommend this one the most simply because I’ve done it and I’ve seen it work really well. So that’s using wppopupmaker.com’s powerful pop-up tool to do a coupon close when somebody tries to abandon your cart. And then the third final option is to do a downsell.

So there’s a couple different types of downsells. One is to suggest in the pop-up a cheaper product. So if, let’s say, you’re selling an expensive membership and somebody’s abandoning, what you could do on the pop-up is say, “Hey, no hard feelings. It looks like you’re ready to go, and you’re not interested in the membership right now.

Can I interest you in the most popular course inside the membership, which is only 10% of the cost of the whole membership?” That would be a downsell from the membership to the course. Another kind of downsell, or you could consider this a fourth type of pop-up that you could do, is to instead of trying to capture the sale, is to capture the lead.

So what you do here is “Oh, it looks like you’re not ready to get the membership. That’s fine. I’ve got a free resource ready for you. Just enter your email here, and we’ll send that right over your way.” So basically what you’re doing is you’re downselling from the paid product to a free product.

And remember, you may or may not have this person’s email address, so at least you are capturing the lead. So that is exit intent pop-ups. I highly recommend the most powerful pop-up solution for WordPress, which is Popup Maker for doing that. It has deep integration with LifterLMS. If you get the Pro version, there’s all kinds of fancy LifterLMS related stuff you can do.

We actually have another episode on this podcast about Popup Maker’s deep LifterLMS integration. The next checkout optimization tip I have for you is to offer multiple payment gateways. Some people miss this, and I highly recommend against missing this. So what does that mean? So in LifterLMS as an example, and again, all the strategies here apply to whatever checkout tool you’re using, but if you’re using LifterLMS, we have several payment systems.

The most popular are LifterLMS’s Stripe payment gateway and LifterLMS’s PayPal payment gateway. And what you wanna do is make sure you have both installed, activated, and connected to your Stripe and PayPal accounts. So why is this important? The truth is, if you’re serving to a global audience, not everybody has access to credit cards, which is like the bread and butter of Stripe credit card payments.

In some countries, that’s not even an option, but people would gladly buy your courses and memberships if you offered an alternative, which is PayPal checkout. So PayPal is available in way more countries and can just service more of the world. So it’s important to get outside of your particular behavior.

Maybe you always shop online with a credit card, but there’s a huge portion of the world that uses tools like PayPal to do their checkout. So essentially, the way it works in LifterLMS is you set your primary gateway. Let’s say it’s Stripe, so when somebody hits your checkout, it assumes they’re gonna pay with credit card.

Stripe’s gonna do the checkout, but there’s a little radio button where they can say, “No, I don’t wanna use credit card. I wanna use PayPal instead.” It switches over, and then they can immediately check out with PayPal. So definitely go ahead and unlock the, more buying power by offering multiple ways for people to pay you.

LifterLMS also has what’s known as the manual checkout as well. So you could add a third option, which is essentially a way to request any kind of payment. So you could be like, okay, first option Stripe, and then there’s PayPal, but then you have a third option, which is send me Venmo or send a check in the mail to my business.

And the way the manual payment gateway works is they complete the checkout, they get the instructions to send you the money, whether that’s a bank transfer, a Venmo request, could be crypto could be a check in the mail, and you basically just give them those instructions. And then their order’s gonna go through, but they’re not gonna get access right away, and you’re gonna get a notification as the site owner that somebody has done a manual checkout, which then tells you to go check the mailbox, check your bank account, check your crypto wallet, or check whatever method that you ask them to do.

And once they pay you, you can manually approve the checkout, and they’re gonna get instant access to their course or membership from that point. So definitely look at multiple payment gateways as a way to optimize the checkout. Now, the sixth and final checkout optimization tip. I have for you, a bonus one, is to make sure your checkout is optimized for mobile.

So what we often forget, particularly if you build a lot of websites or you have an online business, a lot of the time you’re working on a laptop or desktop computer, maybe with multiple monitors and all this stuff. But at LifterLMS, one of our company values is learner results first, which means that we’re always thinking about the end user, basically our customer’s customer.

What is the learner doing? And the reality is, a lot of online education and e-learning happens on mobile devices and tablets. So even if you as the course creator, the coach, the education entrepreneur, the website building professional, don’t really do a lot of website stuff on mobile, a lot of the end users do.

What that means is the checkout experience needs to be super optimized for mobile. They shouldn’t have to try to be on their phone and pinch zoom in on checkout fields and can’t see everything. It doesn’t scroll great. That’s not the case with LifterLMS, particularly if you’re using LifterLMS’ Sky Pilot theme, which is the most advanced WordPress LMS theme with exclusive focus on e-learning.

It’s literally one of a kind on the internet, and it was built from a mobile first standpoint. So fifty-nine percent of e-commerce transactions on the internet based on the stat from Sellers Commerce, is happening on mobile devices. You really need to make sure when you build your website and your checkout. That it is mobile optimized.

And also keep in mind- Particularly with mobile devices the mobile abandonment of the cart is even higher than desktop computers. So if you use a strong mobile-optimized theme with mobile-optimized checkout like Sky Pilot, and then you use the LifterLMS cart abandonment recovery add-on as an example, you’re way more likely to close more sales.

The other piece of mobile optimization is you have to have good hosting for your website. LifterLMS is the most performant, secure mobile-optimized LMS on the market, but you still need to have good web hosting. Every second in delay from a study by a company called WP Rocket equals a drop in 7% on conversions.

So every second your website takes to load on the checkout screen, you’re losing 7% of the conversions, which is huge So we have a list on the LifterLMS website of the top WordPress hosting companies that we recommend that are fast and are gonna give you speedy LifterLMS checkout. And really you want your whole site to be fast all the time for every reason, but at checkout, it’s super important to have that speed on checkout.

LifterLMS is built for it, and you need to have web hosting that is fast as well, which is one of the reasons why we recommend the LifterLMS checkout is so simple and streamlined that the checkout is just fast. If you use a tool in WordPress like WooCommerce, it has way more going on the checkout screen and can be slower and so on.

We do love WooCommerce as well, but if you want the most optimized, simple, fast checkout for courses and memberships I would recommend going with the native LifterLMS checkout and our Stripe and PayPal payment gateways. So checkout optimization is really about two things. It’s about recovering abandoned carts and also optimizing and keeping the users checking out that you already have.

So go get yourself the LifterLMS Cart Abandonment Recovery add-on. I’m super excited about it. Again, not to toot our own horn, but we’ve recovered $319,000 using our cart abandonment system. The LifterLMS cart abandonment system is very similar to the one on the LifterLMS software checkout site. I think you’re gonna love it.

So if you’re just getting started, go get the Earth bundle. That’s our e-commerce bundle. It’s gonna have everything you need for courses, memberships, checkout, payment gateways, cart abandonment recovery, and so on. If you have any questions about any of this, please reach out to us. Conversion optimization is real.

Checkout optimization is a huge part of that. I hope you found this episode useful, and we will see you in the next one. Take care.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMScast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS.com/gift. Go to LifterLMS.com/gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode

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Effective communication, according to Chris, is the cornerstone of a successful remote business and ought to be regarded as one of the most crucial principles of business. He demonstrates that effective communication enhances cooperation, leadership, customer connections, and overall business performance based on his more than 15 years of experience managing LifterLMS as a wholly remote firm.

He highlights that writing is an essential communication skill since it facilitates idea organization, improves documentation, generates more powerful marketing material, and even facilitates more efficient use of AI tools. Chris also describes LifterLMS’s methods for maintaining remote teams’ alignment without overburdening them with meetings. He talks about quarterly planning using the Shape Up framework, organized monthly all-hands meetings that highlight individual, client, and business successes, and the practice of recording ideas in shared Google Docs before they are forgotten.

In order to keep everyone on the team informed and improve teamwork, he advises using Slack for open, public discussions rather than private messaging wherever feasible. Beyond technologies and procedures, Chris emphasizes the significance of fostering a supportive remote workplace culture by honoring cultural differences and communication preferences, recording corporate expertise, and providing chances for colleagues to bond via virtual game days. Additionally, he offers productivity advice on how to communicate more quickly and effectively by using voice-to-text software and comprehensive AI suggestions. His main point is that effective communication is a lifetime talent that enhances leadership, marketing, teamwork, and all facets of managing a profitable internet business.

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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.

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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

 What’s going on? It’s Chris from LifterLMS, and this is a solo podcast episode with just me, where we’re gonna talk about how to communicate effectively at a remote company. I actually had a team member suggest this topic for a podcast. I’ve been communicating in a remote company, both internally and publicly, for over 15 years, and I realized I have a lot of tips and tricks to share with you today and level up your communication ability at a remote company, whether you’re- have an education company or you’re running an agency or running any kind of online business.

So the first thing I would say is to value communication at the highest level. So what do I mean by that? One of our top company values, and we only have six or seven, is clear communication. So we value communication very highly at all levels, both internally in how we write, in how we market, in how we send emails, in how we treat each other as team members, clients, users, prospects, and all of that.

So clear communication is super important to us at LifterLMS. If you value clarity of communication, you can build a better company that’s much easier to run, manage, that you will actually enjoy. Good communication means clarity of thought. So the way I like to think about this- Is writing is the ultimate form of communication.

So writing is not just for making blog posts or building a sales page. We use it all of the time. We use it for figuring out what we’re gonna say in a video. We take notes, we send emails, we do social media content. We write all over the place, and especially now with AI tools, we are writing prompts and creating skills for agents, and so on.

This is all types of communications. So let me next go into my tip around communication around meetings. I learned this saying from one of my business mentors, Dan Martell, that basically meetings shouldn’t suck, and if they do suck, you’re doing them wrong. Now, in the remote world, sometimes companies trend towards no meetings at all, ever, just complete asynchronous communication, which is fine.

But I actually think it makes a lot of sense to have some meetings that are effective with the right people on the meetings on a regular cadence or ongoing basis. So how do we do this at LifterLMS? Internally, we have I don’t know, maybe let’s say … It depends on your role, but for me, as an example, not including podcasts recording sessions and things like that, but when I’m actually meeting with my team on Zoom, not asynchronous communication, which by the way, we’re constantly communicating asynchronously via Slack, which I’ll talk about in a little bit.

But in terms of communicating through meetings at a company we have one all-hands meeting a month, and that has a particular format flow that we do. It basically goes housekeeping, where we just catch up, we talk about people’s upcoming time off and things like that to just make sure we’re all synced up on schedule Then we do a section of the all-hands meeting called Wins.

And at companies, it’s really easy to focus on the problems and the constraints and focus your meetings where most of the content of the meeting is course correction or in general can come off with a negative vibe. So I always like to start a meeting, the all-hands meeting, with sharing wins, and I break that down into three categories.

There’s the personal win. Anything happen in your life? Did you have a baby? Did you run a marathon? Did you move or, get engaged or something like that? That’s just a personal win part which brings the humanity and the, we’re not just workers, we’re human beings doing life together.

So that’s for that. And then we do a customer win. And anybody can contribute to these. It’s not just the CEO talking. It’s anybody can contribute. So in the customer win area, we like to surface recent testimonials or five-star reviews, or maybe we saw on social media that somebody was really excited ’cause they launched and sold 5,000 courses on their first launch and so on.

So we’re always sharing the wins of our customers and celebrating them even if they don’t know about it because- In my view, in business, whoever’s closest to the customer wins, and if you’re not actually, keeping tabs on them, seeing what’s working, seeing what’s not working, but particularly celebrating their wins with them, you’re out of sync with your users.

And then the third win area is the company win. So this is something like, “Oh, we did this marketing campaign and it did really well,” or, “We shipped this new product, it was really hard,” or, “We built this new course that a bunch of people contributed to,” and so on. So that’s an example of a company win. And then when we get into it we…

From here, we go to the actual functions of a business. So the big mistake that a lot of companies make, particularly in my space, software companies an immature founder or CEO or operator will just see the business as just two things. There’s engineering and then there’s marketing. But that’s not true at all and that’s how businesses get lopsided and have big gaps and a lot of failure points.

A business is actually seven areas. Now, you can slice and dice an organization in different ways, but here’s how I like to slice and dice those areas. So as part of our all-hands meeting, I call do it doing a tour of the functions. We’re gonna go through the seven key functions with, key project updates, challenges we’re having giving props to somebody on the team who did well in this function asking for help.

And again, anybody can contribute to these areas. So those seven functions are, number one is product, number two is engineering, number three is marketing, number four is sales, number five is customer support or customer success, number six is operations and admin, and then the seventh area is just the CEO.

This is a moment, a part of the… where the CEO or the founder or the owners or partners could really just contribute some of that CEO stuff like a high-level celebration, or charting a vision, or vision casting the future, or doing a quick reminder of the company values, or spotlighting team members who exhibited the company values in the last week, and so on.

And then from there we wrap up. So that’s our all-hands meeting. Happens only once a month. I used to do it every week, but once you’re rolling and established and your asynchronous communication is really good, I find one hour a month is great for that meeting The next kind of all-hands meeting we do once a month is just called a team game day.

So there’s literally zero business agenda on that meeting. We just show up and play online games together as a team, whoever can make it, and that’s often a game like GeoGuessr has been our latest favorite that’s easy for everybody to play from all over the world. And that’s just a chance to communicate and connect as just human beings without some kind of organizational hierarchy and whatever, just to connect as humans, and that’s all that is.

And it’s super helpful just for putting the human touch in an organization, particularly when you don’t have an in-person office where natural, just personal do life conversations and having fun together can happen as easily The next set of meetings I do really depend on the organizational structure.

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typically this is known as a one-on-one with, your management team or your leadership. For example, I do a one-on-one meeting with our head of growth/marketing. I do a one-on-one with our lead developer. I do a one-on-one with my business partners, and that is really it for how… the one-on-ones that I do.

And sometimes you may have a manager who does one-on-ones who has a bigger team underneath you. It just depends on the scale of your company as to how many people do one-on-ones. So all that is to say, in a given week, I have about three hours w- of three or four hours of internal company meetings.

So that doesn’t eat my lunch. We don’t do meetings every day, and that’s great. And there are times where we’ll do a one-off meeting for something that’s pressing or urgent, or what I call co-working, where we just wanna collaborate with somebody and work on a project together. And then there’s a bigger meeting system we do four times a year, which I’m gonna tell you about here.

I’ll probably do a whole episode on Shape Up, which is the system we use for figuring out what to build, what to focus on, coming up with strategic projects and so on. In this episode, I’m just gonna go over the high level key aspects of Shape Up. So Shape Up is a system for managing a company that was developed by the folks over at 37signals.

We do a modified version. Jason Coleman, my business partner, modified it to work for companies of our size, style and scale. So basically, what Shape Up is the management team comes together in a quarterly rhythm, and these meetings don’t happen all at once, but the first meeting is called the ideas meeting, and this is where over the course of the last quarter we have…

Whenever you have an idea like, “Oh, we should build a product for this, we could c- should create a course about this, we should do this marketing campaign, we should focus on this engineering project, or we should do this on our website,” instead of just blasting that stuff to the wind or losing it in a Slack thread or something like that, we actually have a document where we collect those, and whoever puts it in there writes their name beside it so we know who had it, and it’s like a little tickler file for when you actually do the ideas meeting, which is where we meet and decide which ideas we’re gonna prioritize on in the next quarter.

But the next step is not just to work on the idea. The next step is called a pitch. So pitches between the ideas meeting and the pitch meeting is these ideas that we’ve decided to write pitches for are assigned to a particular leader or manager in the company, and then that person writes a pitch, which is like a product specification, user stories.

It talks about the opportunity of doing this project. It gets into the solution. We give it a time constraint, which we call appetite, and we get into no-gos things to not focus on in that project. It’s basically like instead of asking, let’s say, a web developer, “Oh, we wanna build groups e-commerce for LifterLMS.

Good luck. That’s your project,” we actually get into writing a detailed pitch or specification of how it’s gonna work with interface designs and so on. It makes the purposeful work that we do down the road much better and tighter. At the end of the, that pitch meeting there’s some there…

it’s called the betting table. We present our pitches- And then after those are presented, we’re voting on whether the next quarter is the time to focus th- on this or not. Some of the things that we find in the pitch meeting, we may decide to just categorize as a JDI, which just means just do it, and that just means it folds into the day job territory of whoever’s responsible for that area.

And basically in the betting table we have a whole spreadsheet that where we can put in all the pitches we voted to pursue in the next quarter and assign them to people, and if they all don’t fit, we have to make cuts, which are called notable passes. So after that’s over, the next week begins a seven-week or six-week cycle where we’re, quote, “on cycle” and we actually do the work that each person has in their pitch.

It doesn’t mean they stop doing everything they do in their regular day job, but they will prioritize that cycle project, we call it. So that is Shape Up in a nutshell, which requires an ideas meeting and then a betting table where after the pitches are written, we decide what to focus on.

So that’s eight more meetings a year since this happens on a quarterly cycle, and that’s how the Shape Up system works in our meeting cadence. So that rhythm is super important. So instead of trying to plan a whole year out, we’re basically focusing on one quarter at a time ’cause things change a lot and as you’ve noticed, we’re living in an exponential age with lots of rapid change and stuff like that, so kinda getting in that quarterly rhythm is really important.

I should also mention I also do a one-on-one with myself on Fridays where I give myself permission to step back, review the week and think strategically, think about my team, how I can set them up for success, think about the company, spend a little time more zoomed out on the ten-year vision, five-year vision, three-year vision, one-year goals and all that stuff.

So I also regularly have calendar meetings with myself to focus on something like strategic thinking time is actually what I call it. So another cool thing about the meetings is it’s hard to hold an agenda in your mind or rush to, right before a meeting, to figure out what you’re gonna talk about.

So that’s the immature way to do it. The way that we do it is we actually just use a simple system using Google Docs. So each meeting, whether it’s a one-on-one or the team all-hands, there’s a document with a template and some structure to it that we can fill in whenever inspiration strikes. And what this does, if…

Let’s say I have an idea to discuss with my lead of growth and marketing. I’m not necessarily gonna bother him on Slack, particularly if it’s a big idea, a new project, or something that’s gonna take detailed feedback where it’ll be better on a Zoom meeting. I’ll actually just add that as soon as I have the thought to the document for our next one-on-one.

Or if I have an idea about a future product LifterLMS should make, I will add that to the next quarter’s ideas list that we’ll look at later. So what this solves is it keeps your brain empty, it keeps overwhelm from happening, and it… most importantly, it prevents you from losing those good ideas you have in the shower, or on your run, or while working on something else, so that you capture all that value in a document.

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So when we have meetings, particularly all the recurring meetings I’ve mentioned, there’s a recurring calendar invite in Google Calendar, there’s a Zoom link to join, and there’s also a link to the document, so that anybody at any time can empty whatever idea they have in their brain to that document, which is very efficient and captures value, ’cause we think our memory is a lot better than it really is.

So I highly recommend using Docs to… as a capture device. This is classic getting things done methodology to unload your brain. Some people call it building a second brain or whatever, but I actually find it more useful, not just my brain, but everybody’s brain in the company is using the same system and contributing to these documents.

So we’re more working as a group mind than just one mind, which is very refreshing, particularly as a leader, because there are other leaders, and good ideas, and innovation ideas on your team. So you have to empower people to communicate, speak up, and to use the, The systems and contribute.

‘Cause what ends up happening if you don’t do that is that you’re not really helping people fulfill their potential on your team. Fulfill potential is actually w- another one of our company values. So getting people engaged and contributing to meetings and unloading their brain when inspiration strikes is a good idea.

Now, there are times, of course, where something is … doesn’t need to go in a doc, it’s just a Slack post. So let’s talk about Slack for a little bit. If you’re not a Slack user, Slack is just like an instant messenger internal communication tool for a company. I personally do not like using email for commun- for communication, particularly within the company.

We do all that communication in Slack. And one of the biggest things that makes Slack effective, and where I see a lot of companies struggling ’cause they’re not doing it, is to have almost 99% of the conversations in public as opposed to DMs. And what that does is it allows multiple people to collaborate, and this whole concept of working in public, it just creates more context for everybody on the team.

So if you’re constantly just emailing or DM- DMing people individually, you’re basically operating in an unnecessary silo So when it comes to Slack it’s good to develop what’s known are channels, which are just areas where certain conversations happen. So for example, we have a private management channel in the LifterLMS Slack that the folks in the leadership positions have access to.

We have a marketing and sales Slack. We have a developer Slack. We have certain big project Slacks, like our newsletter, and just getting people to work in public is huge. And I’ve noticed when you do this in a company, it often takes some time for somebody to get comfortable, particularly if they’re shy or if they’re maybe not as confident in their role, or they don’t wanna show publicly that they’re asking for help.

Whatever it is, once you get over all that kind of insecurity, the company is much more powerful and just the public communication and working in public is 100% the way to go. Now, when do you not work in public? When do you actually use the DM? Yeah, sometimes I DM people on Slack. It could be something about somebody has a sensitive question, like HR-related question.

Okay, that’s fine to DM that kind of thing. If you’re ever sending a team member sensitive information or they’re sending you sensitive information, of course, that can be a DM. So I’m not like never DM, but literally 99.5% of the time, I’m always communicating in public with my team. So if you’re not s- using Slack, I highly recommend it, even if you have a small team And let’s talk more about the softer side of communication.

So one of the things you’ll find in a remote company, particularly if you have team members all over the world or customers or users or prospects all over the world, there’s so many different cultures out there, which is one of the beautiful and awesome things a- about humanity. And different cultures and even languages have different styles of communication and different personalities and so on.

So one example of this some folks in different parts of the world are not as comfortable being on camera, so I don’t force that on a Zoom meeting as an example. I do very much appreciate it when somebody does turn their camera on, ’cause it’s like a… it’s a show of being present. I don’t know if you’ve ever been around somebody who’s working in a corporate job and hates their job and there’s a meeting going and their camera’s off and they’re not paying attention and they’re doing something else on the side or not even working.

I find that kind sad. I don’t think that there are like not great places to work and all that kind of thing, but that’s not the goal. The goal is to, be engaged, particularly if you do like we do where you’re not in meetings all day. You’ll hear corporate people sometimes complain about, “Oh my gosh, I’ve been in meetings all day.

I’m double-booked constantly. I can’t get any work done.” You definitely don’t want to create that. So if you can do the minimum effective dose of meetings like we do, and when you do have a meeting give it everything you have, be present, be on time, contribute to the docs and so on. And then also related to international sensitivity- Particularly if you have a business like LifterLMS, where less than half our customers live in the English-speaking world.

Even though we use English at our company as our primary language, I’m always super sensitive to a team member or a customer or community member who English is not their first language, or perhaps they can’t even speak English at all. So it’s good to be sensitive to that and communicate more simply if you’re speaking to a non-native English speaker, and just have some grace and gratitude and, get creative.

Use tools like Google Translate or an AI tool if somebody’s trying to talk to you in Spanish or Swahili or a different language, ’cause the tools have never been easier to communicate cross-culturally, and it’s important to be sensitive. Related to that, in terms of brand voice, we often hear about brand voice communication as “Oh, we need to get everybody in the company to kinda communicate if they’re marketing so it sounds like it’s c- coming from the brand voice.”

For example, the company MailChimp is really famous for having like a good brand voice document, and their team and the interface and everything in that product kinda has the same vibe. That’s cool. So figure out what your brand voice is and, create a document for that and share it with your team and work with people.

We actually use LifterLMS on a private website to power an internal training resource, so it’s full of courses and standard operating procedures and policies and things like that. That’s a good place to put your brand voice. Lifter has an add-on called Private Site where you can build your own internal company playbooks I call them, or standard operating procedures that are not open at all to the public internet or Google search indexing and all of that.

So that’s LifterLMS Private Site. If you haven’t created a internal training platform for your business yet, you are behind. Every company is a education company, whether th- they realize that or not. So even if you sell education publicly, you need a place to document your standard operating procedures, and LifterLMS can do that.

The other area is project management. Project management, people use tools like Trello or Asana or Monday.com or Jira, Atlassian or whatever. That’s another good place to communicate, and that’s really communicating around projects, and you get a feel for it. The more complex your business is and the more people there are, the more necessary strong project management tools are.

But that requires communication as well. Also tagging on to brand voice, it’s really important to communicate in a very respectful way. So what I mean by that is, if you’re sensitive and inclusive across cultures some things which may be fine in one culture where people swear a lot, as an example, may be very offensive in another culture.

So I always try to make sure I’m communicating professionally and I’m being culturally sensitive, whether people have different religions, values, cultures and so on. So it’s always good to do that both publicly and internally. For example, I was at a conference in the UK for membership site owners and the, all the speakers, almost all of them were swearing in their talks from the stage, and one of them said “I think we have an all UK audience here.”

It was just me and a couple other Americans that were there, but there was a lot of swearing and that was– They were okay ’cause it was mostly a UK audience and it was private or whatever. But that’s the kind of thing, if you do that in your TED Talk, you may actually offend or turn off a lot of your audience, which can have a big impact on morale and sales and things of that nature So I wanna share a communication tool that has 10X my productivity that I recently started using.

It’s called Whisperflow, and what it does is you load it up on your computers and on your phone, and you just hold a key, and you can start dictating and it’s voice-to-text. And you might be asking how is that better than the little microphone that’s already there, like on Twitter or ChatGPT or whatever?”

It’s f- I don’t understand how it works, but it works way better. It’s way faster. It works across devices. It saves your history. I find that particularly useful for working with our AI agents and kinda doing brain dumps and so on. So if you’re a slow typer like me, go get yourself a copy of Whisperflow and just try it out.

I’m insanely more productive because of that, particularly because I am a slow typer. So one final pro tip for you, and this is just a artificial intelligence pro tip. If you’re a beginner and you’re just starting to use AI chat tools, you’re not really using memory systems, and the chats are resetting with no context every time.

So one of the things you can do is you can slow down and communicate and create documents. Dan Martell calls these master prompts that you can use to provide context to your AI tool. For example, I have a Chris Badgett, CEO, LifterLMS founder master prompt, which is five pages long, and then I have one about me as an individual personally in my personal life, which is about five pages long.

So I have that loaded up in my AI tools so I don’t need to constantly re-communicate who I am, what my goals are, how I like to roll, and so on. So communication skills with AI, because AI is so fast, you are the limiting factor as a human. So if you can communicate more effectively with AI, you’re gonna be a lot more productive as well and then the last thing I’ll say on marketing and sales, back in my day, I’m kinda old now there was no marketing degree at university.

It was just called communication. I actually don’t have that degree. I did go to college. My background’s in anthropology. But when you think about it, marketing is called communication at universities. Why do they call it that? ‘Cause basically, that is what marketing is. Marketing is just communication.

Maybe you’re doing visual communication and using tools to help you create brand consistency, like Canva templates, or you’re doing copywriting, you’re trying to be persuasive in a email or on a landing page, or you’re trying to clearly, with clarity, describe the features of your product or program or service.

This is all communication. So if you wanna get good at marketing, it’s not about the tips and tricks and the hacks and the ads and the all the tools. It’s really about how well do you communicate. How well do you understand your customer avatar, your ideal customer profile? How well do you understand your team members?

As a leader, what we do as, is influence, and influence can have a negative connotation, but there’s a lot of positive stuff with leadership and influence as well. And in order to influence in a positive way, you need to be an effective communicator. And the good news is that communication is not a skill that you just do once.

It’s a lifelong journey, and you’re only gonna get better at communication over time if you work on it. And it comes in handy everywhere, from working with your team, working with your customers, customer support, selling, in your personal life with your partner, your friends, your family, and so on. Clear communication is one of the biggest unlocks in life.

So I hope you enjoyed this episode. I’d love to hear from you about any communication tips that you have. I’d love to hear what you found most useful or valuable from this episode. And if you want me to follow up with you on anything communication related or you want some more ideas expanded on based on what I’ve been sharing with you here, please do.

I’m Chris from LifterLMS. Clear communication is one of our company values, and I hope you got some value out of this episode. Take care.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMScast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS.com/gift. Go to LifterLMS.com/gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode

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In this LMScast episode, Chris Badgett discusses why any serious YouTuber should create an online course rather than depend solely on YouTube revenue. He contends that the toughest part is over for creators who have already developed an audience; the next stage is to transform that following into a business they own.

By utilizing LifterLMS to offer courses from their own WordPress website, producers can make a steady income without relying on sponsorships, ad revenue, or shifting algorithms. In his discussion of the distinction between renting and owning a platform, Chris explains how marketplaces such as Udemy may restrict long-term growth, price, branding, and customer connections. On the other hand, creators have complete control over their content, student data, email list, price, and company when they own a WordPress website. Instead of relying on outside platforms, he urges YouTubers to create digital assets under their own control.

Additionally, he suggests that rather than attempting to teach all they know, designers should focus their courses on a single change. YouTubers should listen to audience inquiries, study comments, use polls, or create waitlists to evaluate their ideas before devoting time to developing a course. Rather than waiting for perfection, Chris suggests beginning with a single, basic course, launching it immediately, and making improvements over time.

Chris also emphasizes that producers who own their platforms and establish direct connections with their audiences will be the ones who shape the future of online education. He thinks people will always value learning from real people with genuine experiences and knowledge, even as AI and shifting digital trends continue to transform content creation. Creators may develop a long-term company that isn’t reliant on algorithms or third-party platforms, diversify their revenue streams, and enhance their personal brand by integrating YouTube with an online course. Creators may develop a long-term company that isn’t reliant on algorithms or third-party platforms, diversify their revenue streams, and enhance their personal brand by integrating YouTube with an online course.

In general, Chris urges YouTubers to concentrate on building long-term companies rather than just views and subscribers. He suggests utilizing YouTube as a potent lead-generation tool that directs students to online courses hosted on a website they completely own and control, producing enduring value for both artists and their audiences, rather than viewing it as the ultimate destination.

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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. My name’s Chris, and in this episode, I’m gonna show you why and how every serious YouTuber should build an online course. See, the thing is, if you’re a YouTuber and you have some audience, even if it’s small, you’ve already done the hardest part.

You’ve built an audience. Most creators just never turn it into a business that they own. And also, by the way, you’ve developed the skills of being on video, being in front of a camera, getting comfortable with that. So it’s time to build the business. I’m gonna talk about what’s going on in the YouTube landscape, an event I’m getting ready to go to, so let’s just dive right in.

See, most creators on YouTube, they rent their income, and they don’t know it. So if you think about things like ad revenue, sponsorships, Patreon, these services that YouTubers use to monetize They’re actually just renting that income. It’s not coming from a platform that they own and control, and it can be very fickle.

Most YouTubers don’t make any money at all, but of the ones that earn money as a YouTuber over 50% of them make under $15,000, and it’s only 4% of the YouTube income earners that earn over $100,000. So the cool thing to think about here is that views are the top of the funnel, not the actual business. So I’m going with my daughter to VidCon, which is the big YouTuber conference in California, so I’m really focused on YouTube right now.

I’m a grown man. I’m 47 years old, and I’m still… I feel like I was kinda early here in wanting to be a YouTuber when I grow up. I’m 47. I’ve been on YouTube… Gosh, it seems like it’s been about 20 years since I launched my first video. I fell in love with the platform before it became as famous and as popular as it is today.

I’ve been doing video marketing, creating video courses leveraging video in so many different ways for a very long time. I’m super passionate about it. The thing is, most of the course creators that we work with at LifterLMS think about YouTube later as a way to do marketing or get clients for their courses and memberships and coaching programs.

But this video is not necessarily for them. It’s for the people that come from a YouTuber-first approach. I’m a YouTuber, I make videos, it’s what I do. It’s also very relevant no matter what age you are. Like I said, I’m 47, my daughter is 14 years old, and we’re both YouTubers. So this isn’t something that is only relevant to the younger generation, middle of the road, or the older generation.

Anybody can be a YouTuber. And one fact I wanna share with you, which I kinda have a funny debate with my daughter, is that she has built in over about a year about four times the subscribers that I’ve built at LifterLMS after 13 years. So she likes to rub that in my face, but I always like to remind her, I just ask her one question, “Hey, what’s your revenue per subscriber?”

So if you don’t know LifterLMS, we’re the leading learning management system in WordPress. We’ve sold millions and millions of dollars worth of online course software, LifterLMS. We also give away a ton of value for free, including in the free version of LifterLMS, but that revenue-per-subscriber thing is very real.

There’s a lot of influencers and creators on YouTube that maybe they go viral, maybe they’re on a hot topic, and they get a lot of subscribers, but they literally make no money or very little money. Now let me Differentiate a couple different types of YouTube content. YouTube is big for two things.

One is education, the other is entertainment. And I actually like to try and live in the middle in what’s known as edutainment. So predominantly what I’m into is making nonfiction YouTube content that’s educational, but I try to make it entertaining. I’m not the most entertaining person in the world, but edutainment is really what it’s all about.

So for the YouTubers out there, let’s talk about the difference of renting versus owning. Now, where I come from in the WordPress ecosystem, we know this already. Like we … When we build our website, we build it on WordPress on our hosting account. It’s a website that we have full control and ownership over.

So as an example, in the online course space, people sometimes end up on course platforms like Teachable or Kajabi or School or Thinkific, and they end up paying an exorbitant amount of money every month to rent a small piece of some other company’s website to put their online course on. That’s not what we’re about at LifterLMS.

We don’t want our users to have cookie cutter sites where they all look the same. We want people to build an asset that they own and control. So when you’re renting access on somebody else’s website for your online course, you’re subject to algorithm swings, platform cuts, policy changes. S- if your revenue is dependent on sponsors, they leave.

Sometimes you end up in this feast or famine like, “Let me go find money somehow for my YouTube channel.” But when you own your site, you own your students, you know their email addresses, as an example. Like in YouTube, you can have a lot of subscribers, but you can’t email them you’re de- totally dependent on the YouTube algorithm and people only being able to find your YouTube content if they happen to subscribe, if they happen to see it in their feed.

So owning a platform is very different than renting space. So when you own the platform, your income starts compounding because you just have so much control. One of the things that happened in the course creation space back in the day, in the early days of course creation, I’m talking about 15, 16 years ago, there was a company that got big called Udemy.

You may have heard of it. I… My very first online course before we built LifterLMS, I put on Udemy. You can go check it out. It’s called The Poet Omelet Method: Perfect Omelets Every Time, which was just a fun course. I challenged myself when I fell in love with the online course format in the early days to make a whole online course in a weekend and publish it, and I did that on Udemy.

And it wasn’t a very serious course. I just happened to love cooking But what happened is over time, I watched Udemy maximize for profit for Udemy and not take good care of their customers. So what happened is they… One of the big things they did is they created, this was a while ago at this point, a maximum of $50 that you could charge for your course.

They also made it impossible for you to ever provide a link to your own website from inside the course. So Udemy just wants to keep the people, the eyeballs, the traffic. They wanna keep everything on their platform. And then what they started doing is they started doing these course bundles where your course would get included in a course bundle with other creators that you don’t know, and they would discount your course price, the amount you would get paid and your commission by a serious amount, like 80, 90%, and then they would put coupons on top of that and stuff.

It was a real disaster if… And it made a lot of people clear about the value of owning your platform where it’s your rules, it’s your website, it’s more customizable, it’s more affordable, and it has the best support in the industry. So that’s just something that happened on Udemy. Udemy’s cool. I like it.

I’ve taken courses over there, but I would only put free courses on Udemy just as a form of lead generation. I would… In personal branding or whatever. I wouldn’t try to build my whole business on somebody else’s website when it comes to monetizing my YouTube channel. So the first thing as a YouTuber to think about when you’re ready to create a learning platform that you own and control and monetize your YouTube channel is to decide what to teach.

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And what I mean by this is that your YouTube channel probably already has a topic focus, a niche. You have a certain type of viewer or customer avatar that you make content for But sometimes YouTubers are so prolific and creative in making all this great content that you suffer…

you can suffer from what we call the expert’s curse, where you know a lot of things and you’re like what should I actually teach?” So the key thing to do when you’re making the leap to monetizing your YouTube channel with an online course on your website is to start small. Just pick a transformation of some kind of result, a specific result, even an identity shift.

Those are the best, where you create a transformation related to your subject matter expertise. So for example, I like to look at the big mega niches. So the big mega niches on YouTube, and you’re probably in a sub-niche under these if your content is somewhat educational and not pure entertainment, are health, wealth, and relationships.

So what do I mean by that? Health are things like personal fitness. It could be dealing with a medical issue that you have, and there’s many like you that have the same issue, and they’re looking for resources and things. It could be something to do with weight loss or getting your beach body ready for the summer.

It could be all kinds of different things. But if your content is broad, when you’re making your first course, I would look for a specific transformation. So if we look at the health space as an example, I’m an ultra runner, which means I run distances over the length of a marathon. This year I ran a hundred mile run across the st- entire state of New Hampshire, and so that’s like an, a health niche I really understand ’cause I’m been in this ultra running space for a while.

And if I was doing a lot on my YouTube channel, I know a lot of ultra runners, influencers, micro influencers and stuff that have a lot of great YouTube content, but they’re not creating online courses. So if you’re, like, sharing your races and then you’re doing like, “Hey, here’s what’s in my pack. Here’s h- how I fuel for a hundred miles.

Here are the challenges you face on your first hundred mile,” and so on, I would pick my first transformation and I would get specific. So I would do something like- How to go from finishing a marathon to finishing your first 50-miler. And then I would create a course content around that to help somebody kind of transition, just like I did.

Before I ran long 50-milers and 100-milers, when I was younger, I ran a marathon, so I knew what it ta- took to run a marathon. But running double that distance or even four times that distance or more is a totally different game. But anyways, notice how I said I would focus on how to run your first 50-miler, having previously finished a marathon at some point in your past.

So I would go into certain things to facilitate that transformation in my course, like getting into the gear, getting into the training, getting into the nutri- nutrition, getting into the hydration, getting into the recovery, getting into how to work with a coach or decide if you want a coach or not. So I could easily come up with eight key videos or lessons

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 that would make that course.

I don’t have to teach everything I know about long-distance running and all the science and all the health and all the stuff. I’m just picking a specific transformation. And if you’re a YouTuber not in the health space, just to briefly touch on other transformations. If you’re in the wealth space, so for example, I’m in the cr- make money with online courses space.

That’s the space I live in. This podcast has a ton of episodes about that. It’s something I’m really excited about and have a lot of experience in, both myself and across many, We’ve helped over 100,000 people create and sell online courses. And I actually have an online course called the Six Figure Course Plan Challenge.

It’s on the LifterLMS Academy, and it’s literally designed to help you go from zero to your first 100K course. So that’s an example of a transformation within the wealth space, so for courses. But for you, if you’re in the wealth space, it could be something else. It could be about investing or crypto or real estate or boring businesses or any kind of career path that people are, wanna learn how to do and go down.

And then on the relationship front, it could be everything from dating to parenting to other issues with relationships that happen at different phases in life, whatever it is. But I would get specific. I watched a s- a sleep coach, or an s- i’m sorry, I’m getting into health again, but let me go to the to this one example I saw was a for new parents, it was a course on how to basically figure out a newborn and sleep, both for the baby and for the parents.

Super specific. It’s time-bound. Your work- the audience is people with a newborn baby at home up to one year old who have a burning desire to figure out this whole sleep thing, and they’re a first-time parent. So that would be an example of a transformation in the relationship space of being a good parent, and also the relationship with yourself and your own needs in terms of sleep and so on The next piece that’s key, particularly if you’re a prolific content creator you just want to go and just start making the course and stuff, but it’s good to do some validation and not to build in the dark.

So you probably already have some validation. What are the questions that your audience asks you frequently? What’s the most popular question? What do you see in the comments? Which ones of your videos have the most views with the strongest education and transformation intent? You can make some videos about a course you’re thinking about making and ask people to go sign up for the interest list or the wait list.

You can even use LifterLMS as an example to set a course start date in the future, like a month away or even three months away. See how many people sign up for the interest list or pay in advance, perhaps at a discount for an early adopter discount and so on. There’s all kinds of different ways to validate, and you have something as a YouTuber that a lot of course creators or would-be course creators don’t have, which is you already have an audience.

So your audience is free market research, and you already have one. Try to validate before you really commit and do all the effort and so on. You can even make a light version of the course as a standalone video and see what the uptake or popularity of that is But if you’re just getting started, definitely start with a simple course, like one simple course.

It’s easy to start thinking about, “Okay, I’m gonna build a membership, and there’s gonna be this whole course catalog. I’ve got ideas for 50 courses.” That is all good, and I would encourage you to, explore that creatively and stuff, but take it one step at a time. Rome was not built in a day. You’ve already been building.

You already have a YouTube channel. It’s fine if you only have, 200 subscribers or if you have 200,000 or two million. I’ve seen people be very successful in small YouTube niches with a very small audience because it’s super niche. It’s a super kind of pain point, opportunity-seeking niche, and you can do a lot.

So don’t get distracted by vanity metrics like number of subscribers, number of views, and so on. If you have some traction at all on your YouTube channel, you’re doing well, so y- it’s not about keeping up with MrBeast and getting millions of views per video. So the perfect thing to do is just to start and create one course and launch it.

Done is better than perfect, and done is definitely better than fai- failure to launch or never releasing anything at all. And it’s one of those things where once you do it once, it’ll be so much easier, and you’ll be– you’ll go 10 times faster the next time you do it. And you can always expand to more courses and more y- membership and coaching programs and stuff as you go.

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We’ve got content and resources and recommendations to show you how easy it is, and you can look at our case studies. We have Y- YouTubers like Frank Kane, who’s, at the time we interviewed him, this was a while ago, he had made over $2 million with his online courses. He was in the he’s in a tech niche in terms of Amazon skills and things like that, but he has over 600,000 students.

He’s in one of those situations where he had started building on Udemy, but he got unhappy with all the restrictions and new policies and everything, so h- he’s been building up a mirror LMS or learning management system platform on his own WordPress site with LifterLMS. There’s another YouTuber named Christian Taylor who does a lot of software reviews, does some affiliate marketing with that, and some of his views have gone viral and whatnot, and he’s stepped into the course creation space with LifterLMS and WordPress.

Check out the LifterLMS reviews. There’s 389 reviews on wordpress.org. There’s more reviews on Capterra, Trustpilot, and G2 as well. LifterLMS has a really high review rate, rating ’cause it’s affordable, it’s infinitely customizable, and it has the best support in the industry. So you already have a audience, you just need to launch to the audience that you already have.

It’s not like you have to go find more people. Like I said at the beginning of this episode, you’re already ahead of the game. You’ve already done 80% of the work by building the channel, getting comfortable on video, making video, editing video, and, building that audience and getting comfortable up there.

So your own influence that you already have YouTube beats cold traffic or paying for ads. You don’t have to do all that kind of stuff when you’re launching your first course when you already have an audience. So in, in summary I wanna see more YouTubers building online courses. I’ve– I know a lot of young people or friends with kids, and a lot of these younger folks, including my own daughter, says they wanna be a YouTuber when they grow up.

It’s the– it’s like the number one skill. When I was a kid, people wanted to be an astronaut, now they wanna be a YouTuber. So there’s so many people coming online, going to YouTube with hopes and dreams, but it’s important to think about monetization. Yes, you can do sponsors, monetize your channel with ads and things like that, but that’s not the way the pros do it.

The pros do it by building their own information products so that YouTube becomes more of lead generation for the back catalog, their online courses. And if you’re gonna go to the effort to build an online course, it makes a lot of sense to do it on a platform that you own and control. So I’ve got a free resource for you Called Turn Your Subscribers into a Business You Own.

You can go get that at lifterlms.com/vidcon. So VidCon is a YouTuber conference I’m going to in California to connect with the YouTube community, hear their stories. I wanna see more young people getting involved in creating education products and figuring out monetization, becoming entrepreneurs. And by the way, if you’re not young, I c- I’m sure I’m gonna feel old at the YouTuber conference.

It’s- I am definitely way past the average age that’s gonna be there, but these are my people. We’re the creators, we’re the video makers, we’re the entrepreneurs out there that are figuring this whole thing out. And so much is going on in the business of education. There’s never been more opportunity in all these niches to create micro-learning, just-in-time education in very specific niches, very specific transformations.

There’s never been a better time. And if you’re worried at all about artificial intelligence taking over the world In my view, YouTube is going to remain an outpost for humanity. So what I mean by that is a lot of people will read blog posts and articles that may have been written with AI or heavily written with AI, but nobody really wants to watch educational content made by a non-human.

And really, as a human, there’s only one of you out there, so if you think that, oh, 

it’s already been done, this famous person has already done a course on my topic, yeah, they’re not you, and you have your own take, angles, insights, and ideas as well. So I wanna encourage you to, monetize your YouTube channel and become an education entrepreneur, and YouTube is a great place for that, and having an online course to monetize your YouTube channel is the way to go.

At the end of the resource that I mentioned at lifterlms.com/vidcon there’s a link to a YouTube playlist where we go from zero to hero. We show you how to create your very first online course from scratch using LifterLMS and WordPress. We show you the essential steps. We don’t show you everything under the sh- the sun, but in about 40 minutes of content we show you how to create your first online course.

So see what I did there? That’s a transformation. It’s a… We actually have that course on our website, but for the YouTubers out there, you can go find that playlist. It’s in the resource at lifterlms.com/vidcon. If you wanna see the official quick start course from LifterLMS, just head on over to academy.lifterlms.com.

You can’t miss it. So that’s it for this episode. Keep making videos. Everybody can have a TV channel now on YouTube. If you’re already doing it and you’re a creator, no matter how young or old you are, I wanna encourage you to please make your first online course. LifterLMS is here to help you on the journey.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMScast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at lifterlms.com/gift. Go to lifterlms.com/gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode

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