#199 - Circle vs Kajabi for online course creation

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It is Kate here from. Hello, Funnels, and welcome back to the Doing It Online podcast. Now, today's episode, we are going to be getting a little bit nerdy and we're going to be talking software. In particular, we're going to be talking platforms and why we made the recent move from our previous platform set up, which we've had for years, over to Circle. So I'm going to be talking through what we have, why it used to work for us, why it all of a sudden didn't, and why we chose Circle over all the other platforms out there. And we did test a whole bunch. So if you yourself have been a little bit curious about some of the other platforms available, if you've tried out Circle, maybe for a program that you've been in, or if maybe you're just looking for a better solution at the moment for your own courses and communities, then come on through and I'll explain it all.

Okay, guys, so first things first. I just want to put a bit of a caveat this whole episode, and that is that moving platforms can be such a big procrastination technique and a massive waste of time and money, unless you need to do it. So even though I love new software and I'm always checking it out, I am usually the first person who, when someone says, should I change platforms? I will just say no. Unless there's like a really, really good actually impacting your business reason. Usually it's better to stay where you are because often there are more important things for you to be spending your time on. However, if you do feel like the platform you're on right now isn't serving you, or maybe it's just too expensive, or maybe there's some big compatibility issues or it's just not letting you do what you want to do, then yes, definitely, go and have a look. And that is where we were at. So our previous tech stack, when it comes to actually delivering our programs, the course curriculum was all inside Kajabi. We then use Slack for our community. We use Zoom for our online, you know, for our coaching calls. And we used a tool called ADEvent to actually manage that call calendar for our clients. So that was four tools. And the thing was, Zoom's fine. Slack's great advent. We didn't actually have any problem with those, apart from the fact that it was logging in and out of a lot of different places and that our clients also had to be clicking in and out of a lot of different places to be able to access everything. Like, it just wasn't coherent and I really. That bugged me. But it was definitely on my nice to haves list, not must have list. The thing that really pushed us over the edge though was that with Kajabi they have these really, really annoying limits on how many products you can have inside your Kajabi account. And we already had like 15 more than you were supposed to have. But the thing is, I'm the kind of person who's coming up with new ideas for bonuses and stuff all the time. And we were at our max. We weren't able to add anything new into Kajabi without going up to the next tier, which is like another 300 and something dollars. And I'm like, that's crazy because all we use Kajabi for is the courseware. We don't use it for anything else. So I'm like, you know, I think it is probably time to move because I refuse to pay Kajabi another $300 a month. You know, they're not the cheapest platform in the world anyway, particularly when we're using them for like a tenth of what it was that they were actually doing. And there was no way I was ever going to use any of their other parts of the platform because, you know, I was using other ones that I'm very, very happy with. So. So we started to look around and the first place I did actually look was the inbuilt community in Kajabi. I was like, well, maybe if instead of going to Slack we could use the Kajabi community. And I had a look around and I have seen some people do it quite nicely, but it just didn't quite feel right for us and it didn't solve the problem of not having more products, not being able to add as many products as we needed to be able to create new new offers and create new bundles. And I'd actually found myself over the last few years going, well, we can't sell anything new because we haven't got capacity in Kajabi and that's a terrible place to. Then we started to look around and I really was liking the more community style offerings. So we looked at Heartbeat, which I think is really cool, and a friend of mine was actually looking at same time and they ended up going with Heartbeat. It worked really well for what her needs were. We looked at Mighty Networks, which I've looked at before and almost moved to before and got really far down the road before and then stopped. And that's kind of what happened again this time as well. We looked at school which, yes, I know a lot of people are really excited about now and Alex Hormozi's on board, but it just didn't do it for me. It wasn't something that had the features that I felt were important for our community. I feel like if you're looking to have like a free community that has a whole, you know, you're trying to gamify the engagement and just get lots of people just chatting, chatting, chatting, then I think that would be great. But because ours is a support community, we don't people just in there chatting for the sake of chatting. We want people asking questions when they've got questions and getting their responses. So there was no point really gamifying that. So school just didn't make any sense for us. So we kind of narrowed it down to Mighty Network and Circle. And one more point on School. I don't think it looks very nice and I'm all about how things look. It's fine, but it just wasn't quite pretty enough for my tastes anyway. So narrowed it down to Mighty Networks and Circle and both of those definitely have a lot more capabilities for changing how it looks and for making it look, you know, more appealing visually, which is definitely a nice to have, not a must have, but it's always something that is quite high on my preference list. So why did we end up going with Circle? Because we like, we got so far down the road with Mighty Networks and then we got to a point where I'm like, no, we actually just can't do it. Let's just check to see if Circle can do what we need and then we'll move. And the thing was, for us, like the deal breaker last time with Mighty Networks was that their platform was just too confusing and they've since completely redone it. And from a user perspective, it is a lot more simplified, although still quite confusing. There's a lot of stuff in there I don't think you need again, unless you were trying to have that more traditional community style community. But we were looking for more of a support style community which needs slightly different things. But the thing which was the nail in the coffin, unfortunately with Mighty Networks is when you're using an external shopping cart, which we are using ThriveCart again, that's another story for another day that it became quite fiddly. Like granting offers is pretty straightforward. But then when you started getting to things like failed payments and having to pull people out and add them back in and they were already member and they could go here, like it actually was became just a bit of a zap filled nightmare. And I could just see it being really, really problematic for customer service. And we've had a lot of experience with, you know, this kind of thing with zaps and if you have too many zaps adding people in and out and then they're failing and it's no good, I'm like, no, no, no, I don't want to do anything that's going to create a worse experience for our clients and more work for my team. So we had to put a big strike through Mighty Networks and we moved to Circle instead. And I'm actually really, really happy that we did. Like the more that we've been playing with it. We moved everybody over at the start of January, so we've been in there for quite a while now. We haven't fully migrated. Like we're still kind of copying some of our courses across. We're doing those piece by piece. But our main and active courses are in there currently and it's been really great. And the feedback we've had from people is that they've been loving it as well. Once they wrap their head around obviously being in a new place and things being in a slightly different place to where they used to. Okay, so why Circle? Well, as I already mentioned, the look of it, it's really nice and clean and it allows you to add in custom graphic headers on most pages. So you can really make it look like just an extension of your website. And that I really appreciate it. It also looks really good on mobile and it's easy to use on mobile too. And it's just quite clean and easy to navigate. People don't have to go clicking into multiple places to find things. It's just got one simple navigation down the side and that really is where everything all of a sudden is. And it really, truly did give us everything now in one place. So we now have got all in the same community. We've obviously got the course like the full curriculum is there, but they also have their community chat where they get to ask their questions and just chat with the other members of the courses. They also have the calendar for their live calls is there. With a click of a button they could be adding them into their actual calendars. They can rsvp, they can submit their questions and they can actually come in and watch the live calls inside that platform. They actually get a notification when they're in the platform that a call's gone live and they can jump in if they happen to be in there. It also automates a bunch of stuff. And I'll talk about that in a second. So the other thing that was awesome, that was sort of all in one place was the calls, calendars, the course, the chat. No, that's actually, that's it for things all in one place and very easy to find and nice and clean and clear and simple. The other thing was the backend was more simple. So that problem that we were having with Mighty Networks, and yes, if anyone's watching this and you're a big Mighty Networks fan, we asked Mighty Networks for help. We went into the forums, we did all of the things. It's doable, but not doable in the way that we need it to be doable. So don't come for me. Mighty Networks lovers. I know there's a lot of you who love it, and I think the thing with Mighty Networks is if you're using Mighty Networks cart, then you don't have those problems. But we weren't going to do that because it doesn't have all the functionality that we need. But in circle, the backend, much more simple, much easier to be able to grant people access, remove access at the end of programs if there's payment failures and stuff like that, to be able to pause people, put them back in, all that stuff was a much, much simpler process. The other thing that I loved, and of course I would love this because I'm a nerd and I like anything that's automated, a lot of our previous manual tasks now became automatic. So with our live call calendars, like we have about 3ish, sometimes more coaching calls every week for our clients, and they're with the same people and they're on a bit of a schedule. Like one week is these people, another week is these people. And they're normally on the same days and normally at the same times. And we were previously having to manually sort of put those in. But inside circle, we can actually set these up to be recurring events. And yes, if there's one where someone can't make that day, you can click in, edit that one and move it to another date and it's fine. It also automates when you actually do the call, it automatically records it and then automatically uploads it into the system. So again, one less manual task. And of course, when people RSVP and say they're coming, they'll also get sent automatic reminders. So again, just less mess, less things we had to be doing manually, which I love. The other thing that I thought was really cool, that we could now automate which is kind of a bit fun is you could also automate sending people messages at certain times. Like maybe they got into a certain place in the program, a little DM could pop up, you could send them a little message. It's actually got, and this is on the higher level plan, which we ended up going with because it had the automations, but it has option to do really cool stuff. Like, okay, if someone's done this, you know, in a couple of days, you can send them a little thank you or you know, it's got different triggers and different things and we're kind of starting to delve into that now. But I love all that stuff. Like I love being able to send people little rewards when they get to certain parts of the program or automate how things are delivered and just make it feel like a bit more of a fun and engaging experience. And the other little fun thing, which again was automated, is that you can add something called tags and that will show next to the person's name inside their profile and inside most places inside the platform. And you can actually create those tags as emojis. So we've used this like a badge system. So when someone's in a certain program, they get a different emoji and you can see then people asking questions, you can see which programs they have. And we're also building it out that when they do certain things and take certain actions like launch their funnel, get their first funnel sale, things like that, then we can add extra badges and so people can start getting like these virtual rewards. And for me, I think that's a more fun and relevant form of gamification than just giving people points for posting a lot of posts and responding to a lot of posts in a community, like it just seemed to make more sense to us. So that's really been our experience so far. The only sort of downside as far as comment moderation and post moderation from actually from outside of things like from myself and the other coaches who are in the community answering questions. It wasn't quite as easy to use as Slack because one of the features I always loved about Slack was that in the little sidebar you had just two little menu items and one just said like, basically here's the posts that you've missed since last time you were here and here's the replies to your comments. So you could go in and just in one place and you don't have to be clicking into a bunch of different screens, you can respond to them all on that same place. And then if you are wanting to leave them as unread to come back to later. You just didn't tick that they were done and they stayed there. Like, I thought that was genius and I loved that in sl. Unfortunately, they don't have that in Circle, but we've been able to play with some things, tweak our individual notification settings so that we're closer to that. But I did send that through as a feature request to the Circle team and they actually got back to me and said, oh yeah, that looks great, we'll consider it. So I thought that was an extra gold star to Circle and the final little gold star that I want to give to Circle before I this is a bit of a love fest, I know, is that with the different plans in Circle, similar to Kajabi, that you do have a certain cap on the number of spaces that you can have, which could seem like the same problem that we were having, you know, with Kajabi. However, the way that they've handled it is if you would like to have more spaces, you can buy another 10 for just $20 a month. And that I think makes so much more sense than being forced to go up to a whole nother tier with a whole bunch of other features. You don't need at, you know, 300 plus extra dollars that you have to do on Kajabi. So I was so impress with that, like that flexibility, that, okay, we just need that extra thing here. It's a very affordable extra amount. I was super, super impressed with that. So with all of that and the fact that they're adding new features and these features seem to make sense. It's not just like adding weird extra arms to their offering like a lot of other platforms are doing at the moment. They actually just seem to be really doubling down on trying to be like the best they can be. We're loving it. I'm loving the ethos of the company. Tech wise. We haven't had any, you know, glitches and the community seems to really love it as well. So two thumbs up, Circle. If you have also recently moved platforms or if you've been playing with platforms and you've seen one that you like, share it in the comments below. If you're watching this over on YouTube or DM us over at hellofunnels co, that is our new Instagram address. By the way, we are doing an experiment on Instagram which I'm going to be sharing with you guys in a couple of episodes. So let us know. Because I like, I'm a massive nerd. I love to hear all about these things, but either way, guys, I hope you found this useful. I hope. I really hope it hasn't made you think you need to go and change platforms just for the sake of changing platforms. Because remember, we don't want you wasting time on the wrong things. But if you are considering Circle, I highly recommend it. We are freaking loving it. And yeah, that's it for this week, guys. I'll see you same time, same place next week.