Episode 76: What Stressing About The Right Tools Really Says About You!

Welcome to the Create youe Laptop Life podcast where entrepreneurs all around the world come to learn how to market and grow their online business right from their laptops, wherever they are. We don't have traditional nine to five jobs and we don't want them because financial and lifestyle security and freedom is too important to us. We know the world is changing for the better and that the freelance and entrepreneur economy is the cleaner, greener, smarter way to work for both families and businesses. My name is Julie and this podcast will teach you everything you need to know about creating and growing your laptop life.

Hey everyone, this is Julie. Hope you're doing awesome. So today I want to talk about something I don't normally talk about in the podcast. It's kind of a little bit of tech talk here, but if I see another post in a Facebook group about what platform do you think I should use for X, I'm gonna lose my mind. So it's amazing to me how much time people spend thinking about the tools. And obviously tools are important and you know, when you're looking at business, you wanna make sure you have the right people in place, you wanna make sure you have the right process in place and you wanna have the right tools. But it's really funny to me because if you were to, like, if you were to survey a group, you would see that when you look at what business is made of, which is, you know, people and process and tools, there is far, far more discussion about tools than anything else. And I think it's partly a little bit of a shiny object syndrome. It's partly that the tools, marketing, you know, the way the software markets itself as sort of this be all end all magic bullet going to make everything easy. It creates a lot of confusion and there's a lot of competition in the market. So what I want to do today is kind of solve the problem at the source rather than just answering, oh, should I use Kajabi or should I use Thinkific? Should I use Learndash? Should I use WooCommerce? Should I use ClickFunnels? You know, and really get at the heart of the matter. So a couple things that are important. Number one, if you have purchased FunnelRx, that's one of our, that's our introductory funnel building program. It's an add on to Offercure. So you go to offercure.com, purchase Offercure and then you get a chance to buy Funnel Rx. We talk about the basic building blocks of a funnel and we talk about it without talking about tools because this is A problem. And I've seen, and you know, I go through the five assets that any funnel needs, which you know is a sales asset, a cart asset, a delivery asset, follow up asset, and traffic asset. Okay? So if you haven't gotten that course and taken that course, you should. It's one of my best courses. Okay, but here's the thing. Asking a question about a tool without understanding the context and goals of what you're trying to do is a problem because there are a lot of tools and there are a lot of tools that work and there are plenty of scenarios where you can find people having success with all different sorts of set setups. The first question that you're going to ask yourself is, when I deliver my content, what kind of experience do I want to provide my customer? Now, if your content is more based around coaching, around consulting, maybe you do a lot of stuff in a Facebook group. Maybe your course is, you know, six or seven modules, it has a workbook along with it and some videos. It's not a very complicated situation setup. You don't need anything super complicated. You certainly don't need a custom solution for that. So custom solutions are required when you have thousands and thousands of students and maybe they have to pass one area before they can proceed to the next things like that. Okay, in, in those cases you have, you know, it's, it's a whole different ball game. You want to build something custom at that point, but for probably 80 to 90% of you listening, if you were building a program, you don't need that. So pretty much just eliminate all the custom solutions right off the table. Okay. Because they're not necessary. The second question you want to ask yourself is how tech savvy am I? How much do I like fiddling with tech? And if you answer that question and say, okay, I hate tech and I don't really have anyone on my team that loves tech and I'm going to be doing it all myself. You are most likely going to want to do a simple hosted solution, something that is drag and drop, easy to manage, probably doesn't have a ton of bells and whistles, but is going to get the job done. So that pretty much limps limits you to something like Kajabi or teachable or thinkific or Member Pro is another one. And the next question you're going to ask yourself is, how am I going to sell this? Because if you're selling the content in a funnel, you want to make sure that the funnel sells a smooth delivery, right? So for example, if you're using clickfunnels and you have your sales funnel and click funnels and then they buy and then they. You use the membership site in clickfunnels. It's just a very simple, seamless process because it's all one tool and get it done. If you have a little bit more complication, like you have the sales funnel and click funnels but you have the actual content in Members Pro or Teachable or Thinkific still, you're not going to need a tech degree so you're not going have to stress out that. But you will need to use like Zapier or some little program to sort of bridge the gap between the two. Okay, so if you are completely tech illiterate, you want to get a hosted solution where everything just kind of works. If you are, if you can handle Zapier like you feel like you can handle that or you can hire someone, you can combine two programs. Okay, A lot of people I do this, I combine two, I combine clickfunnels and teachable. And it's only for people who are going to be using very complex systems around grading and quizzes and, you know, graduating and all that kind of stuff where you would need a custom solution, something like a learndash or memberium. You know, a lot of WordPress solutions are very customizable, but they also are the most difficult. So as you can see, I've just really pretty much eliminated the majority of the confusion. Now, some of you will still spend 55 hours trying to decide between teachable or kajabi. And this is where I would suggest that if this is the kind of person you are, where you're overthinking the problem is the overthinking. The problem isn't the tool you can do great with Kajabi or teachable. Really, they're similar. And if you're sort of like spending more than 15 minutes going back and forth on which one is the right one to use, you should check yourself into the overthinking center because that's what's really going on. Because somewhere underneath that sort of wrangling and decision making process, you are saying to yourself that this is a critical decision that requires, you know, a couple hours of my time and crowdsourcing. And I don't trust that I'm gonna have success unless I make this decision right. And this is one of 8,000 decisions that you have to make in your business. And so one of the things as entrepreneurs that you have to get really good at is knowing which decisions require the kind of bandwidth that you're giving it, okay? Because if I were to overthink and spend all this time trying to differentiate what I need, I'm wasting my most precious resource and I'm not getting any farther. And I've seen so many people who will spend thousands of dollars on programs and then wrestle with the idea of spending $97 a month for a tool. And in fact, back in the. In the winter, when we were running Launch Gorgeous, one of our students said she had this massive aha. About how much dissonance there was between her value of like, oh, I'll spend money for a coach or I'll spend money for a course, but I won't spend money for an easy program. And instead I'm going to wrestle with WordPress for 75 hours when I could just go get a Kajabi account or a ClickFunnels account for a hundred bucks a month and have it done in a few minutes. As you start to recognize how valuable time is, way more valuable than money, then you start to see that these decisions that are plaguing you are really just solved by saying, okay, spend a little bit of time asking the big questions, which we just went through those big questions, and once you've gotten through those big questions and you know, okay, I'm gonna go with whatever this little pile of software are. My options, pick one, pick it on price or pick it on a feature, and then stop second guessing or wondering if it was the right one or looking for validation out outside of yourself, because that's overthinking. And this is your first test as an entrepreneur, right? This is your first test as you're getting ready to launch a funnel. How fast can you make decisions, be confident in your decisions and move forward on them. And so I hope that solves the problem around tools. Just to give you guys just some backstory at this point, I have made over 6 million, approaching $7 million in business, and I've used the same three tools for pretty much the whole time. I've used click funnels for my sales funnels and my carts. I've used Teachable for my content delivery, and I use ConvertKit for my email service. And I have never felt like I couldn't get something done that I wanted to get done. I have never felt hijacked or handcuffed or like a tool's got me by the teeth and I can't do something I want to do. They all talk to each other using Zapier, and that's how I've been running my business. And I have never stopped to ask myself, oh, is there a better way to do this? Because everything is working so smoothly. I just am committed to the decisions I've made. Now, to give you an example, Kathy and I are trying to branch out into international waters with some of our courses. Well, ClickFunnels doesn't offer certain payment gateways and certain currencies. So at that point, if we're gonna run funnels to South America or to Europe or to Asia, we're gonna have to get a different processing situation set up. Okay, well, now we're gonna look for a tool that can help us do that. And that's fine, we can do that. But this is sort of how you make decisions. So I hope that is helpful for any of you who've been kind of stressing over what tool to use. And I've seen so many people resist and res and resist. In fact, in the winter group of launch, gorgeous Suzanne, she was really nervous about joining the program, wasn't sure imposter syndrome, all that kind of stuff. And she just fought tooth and nail. She didn't want to use clickfunnels. And in a certain type of launch, a power launch, which we discussed, which is the low ticket funnel, we really recommend that everybody get clickfunnels unless you have a really good reason not to. And she resisted. And finally, at the very end, she was like, oh, fine, right. But she'd wasted so much bandwidth, like, trying to resist it, she got her funnel up and running, and she sent me a message the other day saying that she had just crossed over 40,000 in sales, and she was really grateful. So this is my weekly PSA to stop overthinking, and hopefully that helps clear the noise around tools. Appreciate you all. Talk soon.

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