Kyle Ford moved his community from Circle to Mighty Networks after hitting operational walls: no nested spaces, fragmented course comments, and permission bugs that tanked retention. He credits Mighty Networks' space features and staff member Tanisha for a seamless migration, calling it the smoothest in 20 years. His retention improved when members could drive their own content.
There were just features. As my community grew, there were features in Circle. It was like a quality of life type of thing that it just got hard as. Like, for example, we launched a cohort based course well after it was done recorded. We just wanted to flip it over into an evergreen type, of course. But the way that Circle works because you can't have spaces and spaces, we would have to go rebuild the whole course again. And that was annoying. There was lots of little things like that, a lot of it stemming around because you couldn't have spaces and spaces that we just felt like, man, this is really hard to use. It takes a long time. And then one of the biggest issues is it seemed like no matter what we did, whatever settings we used in the, like how to invite a new member after they paid for their plan, they weren't getting access to things. So it was just a constant. Every new customer was more customer support tickets for us. And there was no way we were going to be able to scale with that issue. With Mighty Networks, we don't have any of those issues. It just works to the point where I'm wondering if the support tickets are working because there just isn't anymore. It was just the smoothest migration I've ever had in 20 years. And I have gone from all the platforms, you know, starting off on WordPress and then getting into like Gumroad and Thinkific and Kajabi and I've been through all of them. This is by far the smoothest migration tour. Like, I don't even want to call it a migration. Like, you guys just did it. We didn't have to do anything. Tanisha was amazing. I remember telling her at one point, I was like, you are the secret weapon that Circle doesn't have. You know, like, they don't have you. My team was just amazed because normally like my, my customer support reps, they gotta sit there copy, pasting everything over, making all the icons in Canva and stuff like that. And all of that was just done. And you know, they were like, are you sure you don't need me to do everything? Is everything okay? Am I fired? You know? Well, one of the things that I've learned through some of your own courses and such is to be a host, not a hero. And I gotta raise my hand. I was trying to be a hero before. I was trying to create all the content. I was trying to drum up all the conversations. And I've since learned that a host instead helps host conversations, helps stir up those things. And so the members are creating more of the content. Just like a Reddit, the founder of Reddit isn't in there creating every conversation. And so Mighty Networks with their people magic and all the little bells and whistles that you guys have helps helps me to have my customers making more conversations, them creating the content. In fact, I just had several of my members create their own accountability group. And so they're meeting together and encouraging each other, and that's all happening without me. When we were on Circle and somebody was in a course, the way that they would ask questions about that course was a comment area under that video, which sounded great at first, but then as you get more courses and more videos, now all of a sudden, me as the instructor, I'm chasing up all these different areas to find questions. And then some questions go unanswered for a few days and that leads to unhappy customers and support tickets and refunds. And the other option was like just one big space for all discussion. And I thought that that was going to be a solution. But then it's kind of the same problem. I'm fishing for all the questions. I'm vastly outnumbered. There's hundreds of them in one of me. But with Mighty Networks, because you can have multiple features within a space. I can have a course and then I can have another tab in there as another feature, and that's our discussions, and I can have another tab in there, and that might be a page and that's instructions on that page. And so it just allows you to design a much better customer and then so the customer is having a better experience. But then me also, as the manager, I'm able to find things a lot easier because I can keep all the discussions for the course in one area, all the discussions for another course in one area, and then the customers know where they can go to find their answers and their questions. And especially the newer membership site or community builders, course builders, I don't think they understand the math of retention. And just without getting super geeky, if you are losing even just 20% of your customers per month, then that essentially means in five months you'll have no customers. And so in order to outpace that decrease, you know, like a bucket that's emptying, you have to be growing by 20% every month just to maintain. So in order to actually have real growth, you have to be growing by 20 plus percent. And so that's why retention is a massive problem for most people. It's why some people will get into business and then slowly by the end of the year, it's just they're on a treadmill that they can't keep going. And that's because the retention is eating up their growth. So being able to decrease that churn through less complaints, better customer experience is key. And that's been the major thing. So circle. It was just causing our customers to have more complaints, to not be able to find questions, to not be able to go find their own answers to questions, to not get access to the plans the they paid for, which was creating customer support tickets, which was then creating delays in reaching customer support tickets. All of that leading to, you know, sometimes refunds, sometimes unhappy customers, less reviews. And so just by moving to Mighty Networks, we have far less customer support complaints, we're having less refunds, we're having better reviews, and the customers are staying on more, allowing us to actually have growth, because we have less of that disparity between our growth and the retention, allowing us to actually grow. It can be really hard today because there are so many different options to choose from. And when you look at all the different sales pages and the pricing pages, it seems like they all have the same features. And that's the dangerous part, is thinking that just because they have the features on their pricing page means that it's going to actually happen. And so I have found after trying many of the different programs, that Mighty Networks is doing lots of little things behind the scenes, that their coders and their programmers and their development team are just addressing smaller issues that you don't necessarily see and feel. And that's good, because what's ending up happening is you're having happier customers, the customers are staying longer, their better experience means they're upgrading to other programs. And this is a lot more sophistication in a platform like Mighty Networks. Whereas other platforms might have the same features, they just don't have the same smoothness of operation of those features, and that leads to growth and extra revenue.
