New course, new product – and ANOTHER platform swap 🙃

New course, new product - and ANOTHER platform swap 🙃
17/06/2024

I thought I had all my course platform woes sorted – well, no.

I ended up switching platforms AGAIN!

But the good news is the Business Idea Blitz was officially released, and lots of people have already signed up!

I also added the paid review option, so let’s see how that goes.

Listen to the episode right here

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Resources mentioned

I mention the following resources in this episode.

Some of these links are affiliate links, meaning I will receive a commission if you purchase via that link (thanks!) – see my disclosure here.

FREEBIE FEST! Sign up here to get access to 100+ free business resources. Limited time.

Podia – yes, it’s fantastic, but I don’t want to pay the full price to use one part of their features! Definitely worth a look if you’re starting from scratch.

Cloudways – my fast, dedicated hosting (remaining speed issues are my fault – I’ll get to it!)

Mailerlite – my #1 recommendation for email marketing – I’ve used it since 2017.

Thrivecart & Learn+ – shopping cart with awesome features, plus course platform. Integrates perfectly with Mailerlite.

Episode 10 – talking about my idea for the idea review (there’s just too many ideas here 😆)

Business Idea Review – sign up to the Business Idea Blitz to get your review!

Elizabeth Goddard’s Day Of Voxer – the inspiration for the asynchronous coaching involved in the Business Idea Review, although I’m using Telegram.

Australian Homeschooling Summit – used to be mine! This year, I kicked back and just participated, doing workshops about affording to homechool and tech use.

Transcript

I’ve got a little something extra here for you at the start of this episode, and it is the Freebie Fest. Tyra Reed from The Tyra Reed and The Introvert Coach has curated the best free business resources out there, and I’m very pleased that my Business Idea Blitz passed the test and has been included.

But you probably already have that, and if you don’t, I’m not sure what you’ve been doing all this time. Go sign up for it! And while you’re at it, also sign up for the Freebie Fest, and you will get a mega-organized database of more than 100 of the best freebies out there, all organized for you to go through and sign up for at your leisure. The link is in the episode description and the show notes.

Now, don’t freak out. You don’t get signed up for all of them at once. You sign up to ONE list only, you get the database, and then you get to go through and pick and choose the ones you actually need. So your inbox is not going to get swamped with thousands of emails if you sign up, that is a horrible spammy marketing technique that doesn’t even work, so I would not be participating if that were the case. You’re in full control of what you get, so go find that link in the show notes, have a browse, and sign up for the free resources that suit you.

Now, you might be a little early because it starts on US time and we are way ahead here in Australia, but it will be live today, June 17th. So try again in a few hours if you don’t get the sign-up page, and have fun with all the new stuff that you’re going to learn and apply to your business.

Now let’s get to the episode.

Hello there, I’m Kelly Kotanidis, and welcome to Online Business From Scratch, where I’m taking you behind the scenes as I build my new online business from scratch to a full-time income while making sure it’s a great fit for my traveling homeschooling life. I’ll be walking you through everything I do and why so that you can follow along and build your own flexible online business quickly and efficiently.

So this is the update for day 71 of my new online business, 11 days on from my last update. If you have been following along with my tech woes, you won’t believe this, but after setting Podia up and getting the testers on there, I sat back and went through the free course a few times and thought, no, this isn’t going to work. Basically, there were a few essential features, like embedding products, that were only available on the highest plan at $89 per month, or $75 per month if paid yearly. It wasn’t worth it for me.

Don’t get me wrong, Podia is awesome. There’s actually nothing wrong with it, and tech-wise, it worked beautifully. So if you are non-techy and starting from scratch, I highly recommend it. You can have a site and an email list and all your products on there, including video hosting, and you can barely think about the tech side. That’s their special skill: they make it easy for you to get all of that up without worrying about the tech stuff or making different platforms integrate with each other and all of the stuff that gives new online business owners such a huge headache and wastes so much of their time.

So it is really, really great for getting a business up and running quickly and focusing on your content and products and not wasting all those months experimenting and struggling to get it all to work together. But for me, I already have my WordPress website with my own server on Cloudways, and I have my Mailerlite email list, so I can do all of the techy stuff. I’ve been doing it for years, so most of it is pretty straightforward to me. So, me paying extra on top of all that for Podia was expensive for what I was actually using them for because it was just for courses. I wasn’t using most of the features, and I don’t plan to have paid products for a while until we finish up our Europe trip.

I want to spend my traveling time doing the background foundational kind of work. Then I can do the more hectic beta testing of courses and stuff when I get back to Australia, and I don’t mind then if it consumes all my spare time for a few weeks. Right now, I just want to be out and about in Greece and stopping to eat at every bakery, and so paying $89 a month to keep my free course up seemed a little much.

So I went back to ThriveCart Learn. I already had my lifetime ThriveCart account. As I mentioned in the third episode, I bought it on a very rare sale just after I sold Fearless Homeschool because I knew that I would use it again. And as a rare positive, I realized I don’t even need to pay to upgrade to Learn Plus straight away; I can just use the basic version for now. And even better, for the upgrade, it’s only $195 USD lifetime when I do upgrade.

So I moved my entire mini-course again to ThriveCart Learn, which was not my favorite way to spend a few hours, but I am very happy to say that it is all working perfectly for now, touch wood, and I’m not paying monthly fees. I sent course access out to everyone who was already on the waiting list, which had grown to 37 people, and then I emailed everyone else on my list yesterday to tell them it was ready and they could join now. And I’m already up to 57 people signed up for my Business Idea Blitz, which I am very happy about.

I’ve gotten feedback from two testers, and it was fantastic. They’re both really happy with it. They’ve said that it’s very obvious that I know what I’m talking about when it comes to topics and how to get past all the overthinking and analysis paralysis that is common when we’re trying to pick a business topic. They love the activities, and they really raved about it. It was really nice to get that validation that I’m on the right track.

One email of wonderful feedback came in after I’d spent hours tediously transferring content, and I was ready to throw my laptop out the window by this stage and go get a normal job. The email was just such perfect timing. It showed me that actually, it’s worth the bother. So I finished the transfer feeling much more positive, and I have also added in the Business Review upgrade that I mentioned in episode 10. So I’m interested to see how that performs.

It is only for sale within the Business Idea Blitz at the end of the course. So the idea is that people finish the course, they have their idea, and if they want me to give feedback on it and flesh it out and give them some content and product ideas, we’ll do that asynchronously with Telegram. I did have it set as Voxer originally because that’s what Elizabeth Goddard raves about and uses for her asynchronous coaching, but when I looked into it, most people seemed to prefer Telegram. So I’ve now got a Telegram account, and that’s linked up to the review product.

The Business Idea Review also got great feedback from the testers. They said they wouldn’t necessarily want to commit to some huge coaching package at that point, but a quick, affordable review where I look at their idea and help them polish it and give them some feedback on how they can make it all work better from the beginning is absolutely perfect and would be very reassuring. So hopefully, lots of people agree with them and sign up for an idea review, and I can brainstorm ideas and give my opinions, which are realistically two of my very favorite things to do. So if you are interested in that, there’s a link to the Business Idea Blitz in the show notes. The idea review is embedded inside that, and it’s bargain basement priced right now.

I do think that feedback about liking the idea of a smaller product is a sign of how things have changed online. I do think that the huge programs that cover every element of everything are becoming less and less popular, and people are instead more interested in getting more specific help in a particular area that they want to fix right now. So I’m making sure I apply that while I’m thinking about future courses and products and content. And I’m pretty happy with that because I would much rather spend a month intensively brainstorming, creating, testing, and polishing a small, focused product than spending multiple months trying to cover all the things, because I don’t think I’m necessarily qualified to go really in-depth on stuff like SEO. I’m more at the good enough level. But when it comes to having ideas, creating workshops, or running summits, stuff like that, that’s what I enjoy, and that’s what I have lots of experience in.

So it’s good to see that there is a way I can make the most of that without feeling like I have to be all the things to everyone because I’m not some sort of omnipotent superwoman, and I don’t really want to pretend to be either.

In the last week, I also did my workshop for the Australian Homeschooling Summit about affording to homeschool, and that went really well. So if you haven’t been listening from the start, the Australian Homeschooling Summit and Fearless Homeschool were actually my last businesses that I sold last year. So this year, instead of running the entire summit, I’m just doing a couple of workshops, and it was fantastic.

I had lots of questions, and there was a great chat happening. I think there were over 150 comments while I was on there, and I’ve somehow ended up running a group where we’re doing a no-spend month next month. It was all my idea, and I’m sure I’ll curse my time blindness for that spur-of-the-moment idea later on when I’m actually running it, but I’m sure it will be fun.

I also did a tech panel where I talked about screen time and homeschooling with two other parents. From the summit, I got quite a few signups for my Business Idea Blitz course, and I also sold a handful of summit tickets as an affiliate. So that’s a little bit of income for my brand new business, which is fun to see. So it’s been a pretty full-on 11 days, really.

Now, life-wise, we’re now in a small Greek town called Trikala, which is beautiful, and it has the best community and cafe vibe. Greeks really know how to live a good life. We ran another half marathon a couple of days ago that started at the town of Kalambaka, so that’s at the base of the very famous Meteora monasteries. You’ve probably heard of them. And I got another PB, so I’m pretty happy about that. But I also think that’s it for chasing times for me. I’m not that motivated at running fast, and I don’t think I’ve mentioned this before, but we’re actually training for a full marathon in Greece in a few months. So that’s why we’re doing all of these races. As well as being a great way to travel around and meet people and see places that we might not visit otherwise, it also makes some of the longer runs in our training plan a bit less boring. So we’ve got a couple more halfs and a trail run coming up before the marathon. We’ve basically booked into every race that we can manage to fit in in Greece, so we’ll see how we go with that if I’m still walking at the end of this.

Business-wise, I currently have no further big plans. I still have to make the videos to go in the Business Idea Blitz of me doing the activities and talking through them. I did buy some sparkly highlighters for that, so I hope you like the rainbow unicorn aesthetic because it’s about all I know. I’m also doing a casual interview for a group that talks about earning while homeschooling next week. But apart from that, I’m going to take a week or so to just sit back, run over everything, make sure that it’s all in place, that everything is working, and to think about what I should do next. Should I start creating a course? Should I write a few more articles for my site? Should I start actually recording these notes and posting them as a podcast and get it out there? We’ll both have to wait and see what I decide to do.

Jumping forward to the future here, later on when I’m actually recording the notes that I took a while back, the free Business Idea Blitz course is available, complete with videos featuring my sparkly highlighters. The Business Idea Review is embedded in the course and has been quite popular. So if you’re not sure which business you should start, the Blitz will help you to decide quickly and easily, and then you can get me to do a review for you. I really like doing these. I have gotten great feedback, and you will see some of that on the checkout page. I would love to dig into your idea and help you polish and refine it and give you some more ideas that you’ll be really excited to follow through and will sell much better for you.

So that is current at a bargain basement price while my business gets established. It will go up in price, and I probably won’t do much one-to-one stuff long-term. So please go and check it out now if you are interested.

Alright, thank you for listening. I will be back next week with my latest update on my business building. I’ll see you then.

Thanks for listening!

Got any questions? Feel free to to drop them in the comments below.

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