What WORKED to Grow My Business in 2020 with Cortni Loveridge (Transcript)
Today on the podcast, I’ve invited Cortni to join me in sharing exactly what we did in 2020 that had the biggest impact on the company’s bottom line.
I hope you find the episode very insightful and that you’re able to use these strategies to turn 2021 into your BEST year yet.
This is a transcript of Work Less, Earn More, Episode 56. Listen to the episode here.
Cortni Loveridge:
That was really important to us that we did launch that program because we saw a gap for our Channel Launch members and an area where we could better serve them. And I think that really helped our members and it also gave us a bit of an income boost in 2020.
Gillian Perkins:
We became entrepreneurs because more than anything, we want freedom. We want to be in control of our own schedule, income, and life. But unfortunately, that isn’t always the reality of being a business owner. I’m Gillian Perkins, and I’m on a mission to take back entrepreneurship for what it’s supposed to be. In every episode I’ll share with you how to get the most out of every hour you work, so that you can work less and earn more. Let’s get to it.
Gillian Perkins:
Hi there everyone, and welcome to today’s episode of Work Less, Earn More. My name is Gillian Perkins, and I am your host and I’m joined today by the lovely, Cortni Loveridge. Cortni is the operations manager at Startup Society, and I’m honored to have her here with me today. Hi there, Cortni. Welcome to the show.
Cortni Loveridge:
Hi, thank you so much. It’s so good to be here.
Gillian Perkins:
Absolutely. Well, today’s going to be a really special episode because you are such a special part of our team and I’m surprised that it’s taken us this long to have you on the show. I feel like maybe you’ve been avoiding it a little bit.
Cortni Loveridge:
Maybe just a teeny bit, but I was just thinking about how excited I am to finally virtually meet a lot of people and a lot of your subscribers and just people in Startup Society, because I do interact with you guys a lot, just more behind the scenes. I’m actually really excited to come on, so thanks for having me.
Gillian Perkins:
Definitely. Well, I’m very excited to have you here. I know you’ve been on the list of guests we wanted to have on the show for a while, and so I’m glad that this is finally happening. And I’m also sure that this is going to be the first of multiple episodes. I was just thinking this morning as I was getting ready for what we were going to talk about, about other things that I wanted to ask you that I think would be really interesting to a lot of the members and a lot of the podcast listeners about how you support the company, what your role in the company is and how people could maybe implement some of the things that you do for us on their own even, even if they don’t have an integrator, or an ops manager in their company. I think there is a whole lot of other things we could talk about as well.
Cortni Loveridge:
Definitely, a really deep topic. That’d be awesome.
Gillian Perkins:
But for today’s episode, we’re going to be talking about three things that we did in 2020 that had the biggest impact on our bottom line because we worked on a whole lot of projects last year. A lot of them helped us make money. I hope all of them helped us make money, because that’s the point of working in the business. But definitely some of them had a bigger impact than others. And since the podcast is all about working less to earn more, we do want to hone in on what those things were that really had the biggest impact so that we can learn some lessons from those things ourselves and so that other people can see which strategies had that biggest impact, and so maybe they can do something similar for their own businesses.
Cortni Loveridge:
Absolutely. That sounds great.
Launching a New Offer
Gillian Perkins:
Let’s get started. I know you made a list of these three things that you noticed had the biggest impact. You can just get started by telling us about the first one and then we’ll talk about it a little bit.
Cortni Loveridge:
That sounds great. I would say definitely everything on this list actually really embodies the spirit of work less or earn more. And so I just found that to be really interesting as I was making this list. Last year in 2020, we had a crazy year, as everybody knows. And you also Gillian went on maternity leave as well, so that definitely made our year quite interesting and our strategy on what we were going to do quite interesting as well.
Cortni Loveridge:
The first thing that I put on the list is that we launched a new course called Video Creator Academy, and that was around March-ish, April-ish when everything went a little bit crazy. The thing that I loved about launching Video Creator Academy is just that we really took, like I said, a work less earn more approach where we tried to keep things really simple and try to just get the amount of work done that we needed to successfully without trying to over-complicate things. And so we were able to spend quite a minimal amount of time creating the program, launching it, but it was really important to us that we did launch that program because we saw a gap for our Channel Launch members and an area where we could better serve them. And I think that really helped our members and it also gave us a bit of an income boost in 2020.
Gillian Perkins:
I love how we went into, just the mindset we had when we went into this “lunch.” First of all, our reasons for launching it, wasn’t just because we wanted to make a new program and sell it. It was because we saw this specific need with a program that we were already selling, that we were already offering. And so we saw this gap in the program. The program that I’m referring to is Channel Launch, and it’s a YouTube strategy program that we offer. But we noticed that there’s this really important thing you need to do in order to succeed on YouTube and that’s make good videos. And we noticed that a lot of the members were struggling in that department. They were really focused on the strategy side of things, planning their video topics and their SEO and configuring their videos properly to try to get it to do well on YouTube, but content just isn’t going to do well on YouTube or anywhere else, if it isn’t standout content. Content that people actually want to consume.
Gillian Perkins:
And so some of the members, they had great ideas for their videos. They have great personalities, but the video production quality just wasn’t there. And so I wanted to essentially add to our Channel Launch program, but the more I thought about just adding to the program, the more I realized that it was going to be a whole nother course. It was just going to be so much more information, and I didn’t want to make the existing course, this massive thing that was overwhelming to people. This was really a separate topic that needed to be approached on its own. And so that was why we decided to create as Cortni shared, Video Creator Academy, and to sell it alongside Channel Launch so that people can get both of these programs typically at the same time.
Gillian Perkins:
They can also purchase just one or the other, if maybe they only need one component. Maybe they already know how to make awesome videos, they just need the strategy element, or they already know the strategy element. Maybe they have practiced SEO on their website or something like that, but they need to learn how to make good videos. I wanted it to be modular in that way. Anyways, so that was originally why we created the program. And then as Cortni alluded to, we kept this launch super simple. And so we just went into in a really different way than we’d gone into previous launches. Do you want to share a little bit about the planning process for this launch, Cortni?
Cortni Loveridge:
Well, as we said, it’s pretty simple. Sometimes as an integrator and a project manager myself, there’s a lot of pieces. And so we just looked at everything that had to get done and said, what would this look like if it were simple? And I think you’ve probably talked about that on your podcast before as well. And so we really tried to just eliminate a lot of unnecessarily complicated things going into it. I know we also created the course as we went as well, so that it wasn’t so overwhelming to you to have to batch all of this entire course immediately upfront and the setup as well was pretty simple and straightforward too.
Gillian Perkins:
I remember we kept the text set up super simple and that we barely planned the launch before we started. We just planned that we were going to launch this program and how we were going to get it created, as you said, piecemeal. And then I just jumped in and started promoting it and we just felt it out, which I think for you and… We both are planners, but you are more of an organized planner than I am. I tend to create lots of wild, crazy idea plans and then run with them. Whereas you tend to plan everything out and schedule everything out, and it all inboxes.
Gillian Perkins:
And so it was really nice for me, both because it meant that we hadn’t made, typically when we make plans, we tend to then be overachievers and do even more than we plan and it can get overwhelming and just a lot sometimes. But because we started with very minimal plans, it didn’t turn into too much and I didn’t go into it feeling overwhelmed at all. So not only did things stay smaller and we physically did work less, but also I was able to have a lot more just, feel a lot more relaxed throughout the process. That was really nice too.
Cortni Loveridge:
Absolutely. And I think the interesting thing is it all happened right when the world was shutting down. It was an interesting experiment to see what it was like to launch during that time. If you remember, it feels like so long ago now, but it was a very interesting time for sure.
Gillian Perkins:
I’d actually forgotten about that aspect of it. But we launched the Video Creator Academy at that point in time, the month when everyone was saying, should we launch? We don’t know if we should launch, the world is shutting down. Quarantines had just been starting to be imposed and things like that. And so a lot of people were saying, Oh, I don’t know if I should launch because a lot of people are struggling with this right now. A lot of people aren’t really certain about the future, and so they might not want to spend money, so my launch might fail, but we were able to [inaudible 00:09:18] and feel good about it. Because first of all, we had zero expectations for this launch. We really just wanted to create this new component of the program so that we could share it with our members and with our students, so that they could get the benefit from it and get the knowledge that they needed there.
Gillian Perkins:
And so we had no sales quota we were trying to meet or anything like that. And also, we didn’t feel like, Oh no, we might miss our target for this launch. But also because we created this program so intentionally, and I mean we’d had this real purpose for why we created it. We saw this specific need it. It wasn’t just like, we want to launch something, what should we make so that we can make money? But we saw the need for this program. And so of course we were going to launch it. People needed to learn how to make better videos because they were trying to grow their YouTube channel. They were trying to grow their brands online. And why would we just sit on that information and be like, Nope, sorry, you can’t have it because some people might not want to buy it right now. Well, they can buy it later if they want it. It didn’t really affect whether or not we were going to offer it at that point in time.
Cortni Loveridge:
Absolutely. And I do think the program is better for having that integrated as part of it too, the challenge program. I’ve seen some really amazing results that our students have been able to achieve from it so [inaudible 00:10:31]
Gillian Perkins:
For sure. I’m loving how people are applying what they’re learning in the program. And just the fact that we are seeing these like real results people actually taking it and using it. And that’s awesome. Okay. So Cortni, is there anything else you wanted to say about that? Well, one thing, do you happen to know what the impact that launching Video Creator Academy had on our bottom line last year? At the top of your head?
Cortni Loveridge:
I pulled the numbers yesterday.
Gillian Perkins:
That’s okay. I know it was just shy of 50,000,
Cortni Loveridge:
I was going to say just shy of 50,000. That’s what I remember for [crosstalk 00:11:04]
Gillian Perkins:
47 something or 49 something, just shy of 50,000. Which was awesome considering, like I said, we had zero goals for that launch and it was just like, we want to launch this, because we want to have this and we want to share it with people.
Cortni Loveridge:
Absolutely.
Gillian Perkins:
It was a really comfortable way to earn that revenue really.
Cortni Loveridge:
Absolutely.
Audio:
The episode you’re currently listening to was originally offered as a live stream inside Startup Society, a training program for digital entrepreneurs. Each week in the program, Gillian teaches a live workshop for Startup members, including a teaching segment, like what you’re listening to right now, a tutorial segment that demonstrates how to take action on the lesson and an open Q and A period where Gillian and guest experts work directly with each member. Members also get access to Startup Society’s library of business training courses, monthly co-working sessions and other events and our private community forum. If you’re looking for affordable business training, mentorship, and accountability, then visit startupsociety.com/podcast, to learn more about the program and apply to join. Now here’s Gillian with the rest of today’s episode.
The Perfect Partnership
Gillian Perkins:
Let’s move on and talk about the second thing that you’ve put on your list for things that impacted our bottom line.
Cortni Loveridge:
I’m really excited about this one too again, because I think it fits so well with Work Less, Earn More. And that was that we had a very strategic partnership in 2020 to better serve people in your audience. And those people are specifically people like me who are service providers, looking to maybe get started as a VA or something along those lines. And so, Gillian and Abby Ashley, if you guys know Abby Ashley, you guys met at a convention, is that correct?
Gillian Perkins:
Yeah, I think we met a couple of times. I’m trying to remember when we first met. We may have met a few years ago at a previous [inaudible 00:12:53] long story short, we’d seen each other online and then we met at a conference and we were like, Hey, we should team up. And funny story about this, so Abby Ashley’s brand is the virtual savvy. And she, as Cortni just said, teaches people how to become virtual assistants and build their virtual assistant practices.
Gillian Perkins:
And when we met, we started talking and she was being really friendly. And then she told me that she was being careful to not step on my toes. And I was confused about this. I was like, what are you talking about? And so she explained that she thought that I had a brand where I did the exact same thing as her. She thought that, she had just seen one video of mine on YouTube, maybe two videos. I had these one or two videos about building a virtual assistant business. Where I was just talking about the business strategy component and how to get clients in general. Virtual assistants is not something that I specialize in at all, but a lot of the same principles apply.
Gillian Perkins:
And so I made a couple of videos talking about applying these tactics, these strategies to that business. And they’ve done pretty well on YouTube. So she had just seen these couple of videos I’ve done on YouTube and that they had, I think a couple hundred thousand views, as she thought that was what my brand was all about and that I must be selling a course, very similar to hers. And so she was admiring me from afar, but trying to not, I don’t know, compete with me directly anyway.
Gillian Perkins:
That was just a funny meeting because obviously that’s not what I do at all. And so once she discovered that, that I had these videos that people who were interested in being a virtual assistant were watching, she was like, wait, this is the perfect partnership. Because those people want something that you aren’t selling. They want to learn how to develop their virtual assistant business, how to develop their virtual assistant skills, how to get their clients. And that’s exactly what I teach.
Cortni Loveridge:
Absolutely. Thank you for filling in those gaps there. And so that was how we approached things in 2020. We met with Abby and her lovely team, and we essentially just got a very simple evergreen sales funnel up and running attached to Gillian’s videos and her Opt-ins related to virtual assisting. And we went into it with the idea of, we can’t serve these people directly, but Abby has a really great program that she can help serve these people with. And so we just set up the evergreen sales funnel. I’m just thinking, again, there would be a better way to serve our audience and it turned out to be really successful. I think more maybe even than either of us were expecting. And so that was the second thing on my list for 2020, is a strategic partnership that brought in some affiliate revenue this year. And I think we definitely both agree. We want to do more in 2021 as well.
Gillian Perkins:
Absolutely. And the way we set up that evergreen funnel, it was the simplest on our end it could possibly be. In fact, it was so simple that I didn’t think it was going to work very well because we didn’t kick it off with a big promotion for her. We didn’t do a live webinar with her or anything like that. We used her existing evergreen webinar. And as far as I remember, Cortni, fill us in if there’s something I’m forgetting, but I think that basically all we did was we set it up so that after someone signs up for one of our virtual assistant related freebies, which I think there’s only one or two of. After they sign up for that, they get taken to a thank you page. And on the thank you page, it tells them about Abby’s free webinar. And then after someone signs up for one of those virtual system freebies, also they get, I believe three emails after that, telling them more about her webinar.
Gillian Perkins:
Is there anything else? We initially sent those emails, I think to people who had signed up for those freebies in the past. But that was as far as the launch went. And I think that Abby wrote those emails and created a framework that then I built off of and I edited these emails to personalize them inside, but it was very minimal on our part, which was obviously super nice. Like I said, I was a little bit doubtful it would work, but it has worked so well.
Gillian Perkins:
We’ve seen more revenue come in from that affiliate program than from I think any other affiliate program I had tried prior to that, so that’s really cool. And also the thing that I love is that we have gotten the best feedback from people who’ve gone through Abby’s program. We’ve gotten so many emails from people saying, thank you for sending me this link to the webinar. Thank you for telling me about this program. A lot of people have told us that they have signed up for Abby’s program and that they’ve enjoyed it. I even got a letter in the mail, a Christmas card from someone telling me, thank you so much for telling me about this program because they are loving it, so it’s been awesome. Cortni, do you have any idea how much we did earn from the program in 2020?
Cortni Loveridge:
Again, I wrote it down. I don’t quite remember.
Gillian Perkins:
Do [inaudible 00:17:34] a ballpark.
Cortni Loveridge:
A ballpark I think is around 37,000.
Gillian Perkins:
$37,000.
Cortni Loveridge:
I could be wrong, but…
Gillian Perkins:
That sounds about right to me, based on what I’ve been seeing each month. I hadn’t looked at the total for the year, but that sounds about right. And that’s for something that took us definitely less than 10 hours to set up, definitely. And that’s including the back and forth communication, everything. The actual setup itself probably took us three hours, would be my guess, but definitely a project well worth it.
Cortni Loveridge:
And again, I think the thing I love most about it is just that we’re better able to serve our audience. You saw a gap in something that you felt like they needed. Abby came at the right time, it was a really good fit and it really seems to be benefiting everybody who is interested in going that route. Again as a service provider myself, I think Abby is a really strong leader in the industry and she puts out some really amazing course content. I’m very pleased with that.
Gillian Perkins:
Absolutely. I’m seeing this common thread here. There’s an extreme disproportion with the amount of time we put in with some of these things and the amount of revenue they earned. And keep in mind is that when Cortni, put together this list of the three things we did that had the biggest impact on our bottom line, she wasn’t looking for the things that had that biggest disparity, where we had put in a very small amount of time and earned a very large amount of money. She was just looking for the things that had earned us the most money. And these were the things. You’ve got one more to share with us. What’s the third thing on your list?
Maternity Leave and Business
Cortni Loveridge:
The third thing is related to maternity leave and our general focus for 2020, which was to really go fully into mindset around what would this look like if it were simple? How can we streamline things? And how can we get things going to better serve our customers? So the third thing for me is just spending a good amount of time on evergreen sales funnels and just really getting clear on exactly what our customers’ journey would be from beginning to end, and really tightening up those processes.
Cortni Loveridge:
Because when you approached me and told me that you were going to be going on maternity leave, that was obviously a very impactful thing to happen in 2020, because you took off a fair amount of time. And so we just really wanted to make sure that we spent a large amount of time last year to make sure that those things were really smooth and working properly and set up so that you could feel like you could take a break and relax and the business would continue to run. That’s my final thing on the list for things that made a big impact. Just overall, we saw that the experience was better for our potential customers. It did boost revenue as well because people were seeing more emails telling them about our products and things of that nature. And I’m sure you have more to add to that as well.
Gillian Perkins:
Definitely. This is one of those things where you, it’s one of those things that’s an important thing, but not an urgent thing. And so you might put it off for while really working on it. But long story short, I’ve been aware for a while that we didn’t have really strong processes that led people from finding out about the brand and getting interested to actually making a purchase. We were getting tons of visibility via YouTube, via Google, sometimes via collaborations. And then the email list was growing like gangbusters, but then all we were doing to sell to these people was occasionally doing live launches. We had a couple half built evergreen funnels that sold to some extent, but just a couple and they were just halfway there. And so I knew that this was a need, but we were totally getting by just doing live launches on a regular basis.
Gillian Perkins:
And as someone who always has another idea that was working for me, because I always had another idea for a product I wanted to launch or a way I wanted to try launching it, so there was always things we wanted to test out live anyway, but it meant that I couldn’t take time off and see sales continue to come in. And it also meant that of course revenue was being more up and down. And it meant that there wasn’t this baseline that would we did a live launch, it just pushed us above that baseline.
Gillian Perkins:
Basically we’re just riding on the momentum of those live launches for the most part. The thing that was steady and I just want to point this out was we did have the membership program going. And so that was our baseline. That 10 to $15,000 a month that was coming in from Startup Society. And so our live launches would push us above that.
Gillian Perkins:
But what we really wanted to do was bump that baseline up significantly by having every program that we sold have consistent monthly sales coming in, so that, that baseline was something more like 30, 40 or $50,000, and then our live launches would push us significantly above that. We needed to double down on this, but this was not going to be something like those first two things we talked about, it was just going to be a few hours of work and then lots of money. It wasn’t going to be like that. It was going to be a lot of blood, sweat and tears honestly. Even if it wasn’t necessarily always a lot of hours, it was a lot of thinking. It was a lot of trying to figure out how to make it work.
Gillian Perkins:
And then oftentimes it was also a lot of work after that, just because there’s a lot of moving pieces. Now I don’t want to scare people off and make it sound like building an evergreen funnel has to be this difficult, but especially because we were trying to work with something that already existed and trying to improve it and wrangle it and turn it into something different, there was a lot of growing pains with it.
Cortni Loveridge:
Absolutely. And I think when I say this thing also embodies the Work Less, Earn More is just, we put up that work upfront so that you could then take this time off. We were working pretty hard to get up to that point. There’s no way to sugar coat that, but the payoff, I feel like was pretty significant during maternity leave and beyond.
Gillian Perkins:
For sure. I know at least both of us were working about twice as much as we normally do for the three or so months prior to maternity leave, three to four months. But then I took time completely off. And your work hours dropped significantly as well as I shared with podcasts listeners in a previous episode, just because I wasn’t in the office making work for us. We saw that reward there, but then we’ve continued to see the payoff now, because even now we’re continuing to work, I would say on the lower end of the range of hours that we could work, but we’re continuing to see those higher revenue numbers from these evergreen funnels that are built.
Gillian Perkins:
We initially built the funnels. That was the first big project we got them done before I took the time off for maternity leave. And just to clarify, the reason why we were working twice as much was because we were doing all of our regular work plus all of the work to build these funnels. And so that was a lot. And if we hadn’t been crunched with the fact that I was going on maternity leave soon, and there was a date for that, we definitely could have spread it out and we didn’t have to work that much. That was just how we chose to do it.
Gillian Perkins:
And since then we’ve seen this continued pay off and what we’ve done after building those funnels initially is we’ve continued to improve them. And so now that is the little extra thing we’re constantly adding to our plate is how can we improve one aspect to this funnel so that we can constantly be making them convert at higher rates?
Cortni Loveridge:
Absolutely. I think as being your integrator, it’s really important for me to constantly be looking at how things are performing and really embracing the spirit of testing and trying to tweak things and make them even better for people. You and I both seem to really enjoy that aspect of it.
Gillian Perkins:
Definitely. I think we’re both very improvement oriented, and have high standards for things. And so now this one is going to be much harder to quantify as far as how big of an impact did it have as far as a specific revenue number. What I can say for sure is that I took three months off for maternity leave and we continued to earn around $30,000 a month for each of those months. And that simply wouldn’t have been possible if we hadn’t built those funnels.
Gillian Perkins:
If we hadn’t, then we probably would have just essentially seen the Startup revenue, Startup Society revenue and maybe YouTube revenue, so we probably would have earned about 20,000, so about an extra $10,000 a month for three months. And then in addition to that, just this continued increase now because now we have that foundation that we’re building on. Now instead of maybe the 20 to 25,000 per month average revenue we were seeing prior to building the funnels, now we’re seeing something more like 30 to 35 per month. Just this significant little bump up in revenue, but again, hard to put a specific dollar number on, just because it touched so many different aspects of the business.
Cortni Loveridge:
You pretty much nailed it. That’s exactly what I was going to say.
Gillian Perkins:
Awesome. Well, Cortni, thank you so much for putting this list together and for coming on the show today, to share these things with us. For everyone who is tuning in for today’s live session, I just want you to be aware that we are going to be doing these live sessions each and every week. Sometimes I will have a guest with me like Cortni, has joined me today. Sometimes I’ll be doing solo episodes and sometimes I’ll even be doing the income reports here live. Although after discussing podcast strategy for this year, we’ve decided to take a slightly different approach to the income reports. And we’re actually for 2021, we’re going to be doing quarterly income reports instead of monthly income reports. Now I’m sure that I’ll talk more about this when I actually do the first quarterly income report, but that’s going to be a while, it’s going to be two and a half months before you see that, so I did want to take just a minute right now to tell you a little bit of the backstory there.
Gillian Perkins:
And so long story short, I’ve just been noticing that a month is not a long enough period of time to really get an idea of the trends of where the revenue is going, where the expenses are going, whether these things are going up or going down. And also I noticed when I did the end of year income report, that I was able to give you such a more complete picture of projects that we did and how they actually paid off. Versus when we were looking at a month over and over again, I just found myself saying, this is how much we worked this month and this is how much we earned. But those things really were not correlated.
Gillian Perkins:
We earned this much because of work we did a few months ago. I’m hoping to solve that problem. And then I also have just noticed that looking at that snapshot every month, I often feel, have that negative comparison feeling where I’m just looking at, Oh, it was better than last month, oh, it was last, and feeling emotionally jerked around by that. But when I look at the quarterly reports or the end of year income reports that I’m seeing just this much more holistic picture, and I’m able to understand a lot better what’s happening and why, and feel a lot healthier about it. I’m hoping that this will both serve you guys better and give you just this more complete picture, so you better understand things and also help me to better understand things and process them. Like I said, I’ll explain a little bit more about that when we have that income report, but it’ll be a while.
Audio:
Thanks for listening to this episode of Work less, Earn More. Before we wrap this up, listening to this question, a Startup Society member asked during the live stream.
Gillian Perkins:
The first question comes from Espresso Devora and she asks, what software do you use for each funnel? Cortni, do you want to answer this question?
Cortni Loveridge:
We as a few different softwares actually. I know that there are all in one platforms out there, but we tried to use the ones that we feel are best going to serve the business and serve our audience. We use ConvertKit, as you guys probably know for email marketing. Let’s see Gillian, what other softwares? That’s the primary one we’ve been working out of. Is writing emails and things like that.
Gillian Perkins:
Definitely. We take a very modular approach to this. Like you mentioned, there are these all in one options, we could be using ClickFunnels or Kajabi or something like that, but we are both, we just have high standards for things. And so whenever you take one of those all-in-one options, the pro is, it’s to be easier and it’s going to be simpler. The con is that you won’t have all the functionality you want. And it’s always a tough decision. Whether you should go with one or go with the other. And honestly, if we were starting from scratch right now, I quite possibly would go with one of those all in one solutions. But we’ve built the business modularly and so now we’re very familiar with these different systems that we use and we’ve gotten them to work together very well, and we have this advanced functionality each of them that we are actually utilizing. And if we switched to an all-in-one platform, we would just lose that. And we would personally, we would find that very frustrating.
Gillian Perkins:
We’ve been testing out Kajabi and I’ll probably do a podcast episode with a report on that, the pros and the cons that we experienced with Kajabi. Because it’s definitely is a very powerful software, but as you said, Cortni, the core of our funnel software suite would be ConvertKit, which is our email marketing platform. And most of the funnels that we run do have this email marketing backbone that then we’re adding things onto. We’re adding webinars onto, or we’re adding Facebook ads onto to drive traffic into them or different components like this. So I would say ConvertKit is our funnel building software really. And then the other thing people might wonder about is how do we host webinars and things like that. We’ve tried a few different options that we’ve been unhappy with. And what we’re doing right now is we’re self hosting them on my website, using Vimeo as our live stream platform. And this has worked better than anything else we’ve tried and it’s easier and it’s cheaper. So we’re a fan. It’s not perfect, but it’s the best thing we found so far.
Cortni Loveridge:
Absolutely. I think that’s an interesting thing that we’re doing that most people might not think about, using a less traditional thing, rather than a webinar software. Another thing that we do use is Deadline Funnel. Just to really stick to our scarcity, our deadlines, to make sure that things are showing correctly at the right times. That’s also something that we use as well.
Gillian Perkins:
Just to explain a little bit about that, basically when you run a promotion, you want it to have a specific end time, and you want it to be organized and actually ended that time when you said the sale’s going to be over on Friday night at 10:00 PM. You want the sale to actually be able to end then so that you are fulfilling your promise for when this promotion is available. And especially with online stuff, it can be tricky to shut it down. And especially a lot of the time you want the end time for something to be at midnight and we don’t want to stay up till midnight. Deadline Funnel allows us to have this software that we put on different pages of the website that will automatically turn off those pages. It will redirect them to other pages.
Gillian Perkins:
And then also if we do an evergreen funnel where different people, so someone signs up for a free opt-in for a webinar. And then after the webinar, they’re supposed to have the opportunity to purchase for one week or for three days, but everyone will be on a different schedule. And so what deadline funnel will do is we’ll make the time or start for them at the correct time, so that they can get that promised window of time to purchase the product.
Gillian Perkins:
Well, Cortni, thank you so much for joining me today. This has been awesome. I so appreciate you taking the time and sharing your expertise and for everything else that you do here at Startup Society. You’re such important part of the team. So thank you so much.
Cortni Loveridge:
Thank you so much for having me. It’s really nice to meet you guys.
Gillian Perkins:
All right. Well that is everything for today. Thank you so much for joining me for today’s episode. If you found this episode helpful and you would like to participate live in future recording sessions, then be sure to visit startupsociety.com/podcast to learn more about all the benefits of membership and apply to join. And finally, it would be a big help. If you left Work Less, Earn More a review on Apple podcasts. Not only will this help us reach more people, but it’s also going to give you the chance to potentially win a 12 month membership to Startup Society. All you need to do to enter is post your review on Apple podcasts, then email a screenshot to contact@gillianperkins.com. Thanks again so much for listening. Now let’s wrap this up. I’m Gillian Perkins, and until next week stay focused and take action.
