- I've just wasted over £5,000 developing a website
for my IT coaching business in WordPress.
And I ditched it all for Kajabi.
Let me tell you why.
One of my business ventures
after selling my business last year,
is to coach other IT business owners.
My plan, over time,
was to build out a website where they can sign up
and get access to templates and resources.
And over time allow me to build out a training course.
And we almost, almost got there.
Almost.
I worked with a web developer who did a great job
on the WordPress website, came up with a great design.
But with all the little tweaks around signing up members,
and integrating it with a CRM system,
and having an optional ability to sell separate courses
or resources, which I then plan to create
over the coming months and years.
And all of that resulted in just a lot of tweaking,
and adjustments, and sort of like, work arounds
and just a lot of faffing.
We were using plugins completely against
the way they were intended for.
And basically to cut a long story short,
I switched it all to Kajabi.
Now, what the tech is Kajabi, I hear you ask.
Kajabi is like WordPress, but on steroids.
And it's built specifically for membership websites.
And I'd never really heard of it before.
Oh, actually I lied.
I had heard of it before, but I'll be honest.
I took one look at their monthly pricing
and just went "nope!"
and then got back to throwing money
at fudging this WordPress website thing together,
and more on that in a second.
But Kajabi is the only all in one service
that you can use to run a membership platform,
to run courses, training modules,
and even sell both physical and digital products.
It is a CRM, automation, and sales system all in one.
And it is so easy to use.
Literally, I thought I'd found a game changer
when I discovered Divi for WordPress,
which kind of makes WordPress like drag-and-droppable.
But Kajabi just takes this all to an entirely new level,
and because of how easy it is to use.
And after spending five grand on my WordPress website,
which literally took months to build,
well, I built my own website in Kajabi
in like two days.
Now, admittedly I did have a design that I mostly copied
from that five grand WordPress website.
I couldn't exactly flush all of that investment
down the toilet, but.
With that said, that is still pretty damn good
to achieve a whole website build in just two days.
And I'm not fully technical.
I mean, I am technical, but I don't do coding
and website design and all that stuff.
But, with all of that good stuff said,
I do want to address some bad stuff,
because it did become a pain in the rear
trying to figure just like a couple of these bits out.
Now number one is the CRM system is pretty good,
and can do a lot of the things that I do want,
but it's not as flexible yet
as the likes of, say, ActiveCampaign
which is probably I think my favourite CRM system
at the moment right now.
And in fact it is the one I use, and still use to this day.
So currently I can't quite ditch the CRM.
Number two is tax.
And this is one where just don't understand
if you are a business that needs to charge tax,
Kajabi won't do this out of the box.
You have to look at other systems which can calculate
and then invoice tax properly.
Well, for me, this is a system called ThriveCart.
That's something I'll leave a link in the description below
along with a link, of course for Kajabi.
And if you use those links,
you'll be supporting the channel.
So, thank you.
But outside of those two issues,
for me, it's all good news.
- Good news, everyone!
- Using Kajabi and ThriveCart together,
I can easily sign up customers
who enter their credit card details,
sign up to a monthly coaching service.
And then they also now get access to a training course
or soon to be courses,
which you can log in and watch and read, listen,
module by module.
It is super easy, even easier than WordPress.
Even when using something like that Divi theme,
which is pretty drag-and-droppable as it is.
Yeah, it's even easier than that.
I can sell my courses.
I can keep track of everyone's progress,
I can sell digital downloads.
It does everything that I need it to do
for my coaching business.
So that is why I spent £5,000
on my website
and then didn't even use it.
I've now even migrated my own personal website across,
again from WordPress to Kajabi.
And it's not a membership website, but it just
makes so much more sense to keep it all in one place.
Cost-wise, Kajabi starts from $119 per month
which, on the face of it, sounds expensive.
Yeah. Remember when I said when I first looked at Kajabi,
I instantly canned the idea based on that cost alone.
But, once I added up the cost of what I was already paying
for proper web hosting,
of all the WordPress plugins I was using,
their maintenance and renewal fees,
the cost I was paying to my web developer
every single time I wanted like a small tweak to the code
or decided I wanted to do something slightly different
on the website?
That cost of $119 is actually marginally cheaper than that.
And someday, I hope to be able to ditch the CRM system, too.
I mean, that alone is $49 per month.
And if that is the case, then,
Kajabi becomes significantly cheaper.
By a long shot.
And, the CRM system isn't bad in Kajabi,
it just doesn't do what I want to use it for.
And for me, it doesn't quite do a couple of things
which are specific to me around automations,
but it could be ideal for your own business.
So, if you are interested in using Kajabi
to power your online business,
then you can use the link in the description below
to sign up for a free 14 day trial.
And build up your own website in maybe two days
but a very short space of time, just like I did.
A little hack, I did also then message them
a couple of times to extend the free trial,
just whilst I was trying to get things finished off.
But there is also a link down there for ThriveCart,
which I highly recommend if you are, say, a business,
and you need to account for your tax properly.
Now this isn't sponsored,
they haven't paid me to say any of this.
In fact, I'll throw up a copy of the invoice
that I've just paid to Kajabi for my website.
But, the link below is an affiliated link,
which if you're kind enough to use it,
provides income for this channel,
so I can keep making content.
If you have any more questions around Kajabi
then drop 'em in the comments below.
Don't forget to, of course, like the video,
subscribe to the channel if you're not already.
I'll see you in the next video.
Thanks. Bye-bye.