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Megan Walker: Hello and welcome to Healthcare Online. I'm Megan Walker and today my very special guest is Will Winters from Kajabi. Hi Will, how are you?

Will Winters: Hello I'm doing great. It's great to be here.

Megan Walker: So good to have you Will. And for those of you who have not met Will before, Will is my secret weapon. We meet very regularly and he has guided me through many iterations of my own online course business and has been a huge help to me and I wanted to bring him on today to share some of his wisdom and insights with all of you who are new in the course creation space. So, Will tell us a little bit about what your role at Kajabi entails and how long you've been there.

Will Winters: Yeah, great question.

I am a customer success manager, so my role entails helping experts and creators be successful on our platform. And that usually means starting, launching, growing and operating a successful course or community membership business, something like that. So whether it's optimising something that's already existing or strategising something we try to help people in every stage.

Megan Walker: Oh, good. And it's been a huge help to me. And tell us in your time that you've been at Kajabi and working with these clients. I imagine that a lot of them you see from absolute beginner thinking, my own journey going, what's a landing page and where do I put a form?

What are some of the successes that you've seen, the rags to riches examples of what you've seen.

Will Winters: Oh man. That's tough. So I've been here at Kajabi for six years, so I've seen it all. I've worked with people like Amy Porterfield, but I've also worked with people who haven't started yet and are really starting from zero. So it's really all over the place. I think there's a few common threads. You know, people, for instance, like a YouTube creator or someone with a large audience who is now monetising, that's obviously the best spot to be in because you already have an audience. But I've also worked with a ton of people who are starting from zero and have seen them grow and develop something that's sustainable, you know? There's one who helps people with fear of public speaking and within a year he's at $400,000 a year.

So I think it was something like 16 months it took him to get to that spot. And his business is simple. He has one higher ticket course and he does SEO and Google search ads. So that's one that, that really comes to mind.

He's just inspired to do a course that actually delivers results and shows up where people are looking for that solution.

Megan Walker: That sounds like the brilliant segue into my next question, which is the ones who are doing well, or on the path to doing well, they're on the trajectory. What behaviors would they have in common?

What's the secret sauce of someone who is going to make it with online courses?

Will Winters: That is the key, that is the real question because sadly, I've been here for a long time, and so I've seen a lot of people have the attitude of build it and they will come, you know? And that just doesn't work.

You know it's not a coffee shop on the corner where people can see it and they're just driving by. It's different. Additionally, a lot of the gurus in the space make it seem simpler than it is because they're trying to sell their own stuff or they're trying to paint a vision of what they've accomplished.

And in doing so maybe don't paint the whole picture. But the people who I've seen do really good - one they create for pain points. And not for like, an idea of what they think might sell. A lot of times we fall in love with the ideas we have, whether it's a name or an idea or whatever.

But the people who really create to solve pain points that'd be the first thing. And then the second thing is that they commit to experimentation. And they're more flexible. So they might do something, release something, put it out into the world and say, oh, that didn't really work. And instead of saying, hmm, that didn't really work, this business isn't for me, they just pivot and they go, okay, well maybe it's the price. Maybe it's the messaging. Maybe it's something else about the offer. And so committing to experimentation and then obviously obsessing about customer support or the transformation of your students or customers.

Megan Walker: Because it has to actually deliver, doesn't it? Like the person has to learn and move them, their situation from A to B, whatever that is, if they just come into the course. Yeah, and it does nothing.

Will Winters: Yeah. It's impossible to have something sustainable and not deliver results.

Megan Walker: Yes. They're such great points. Create for pain, commit to experimenting. And what was the third one we just said?

Will Winters: Obsess over customers obsess and their success. 

 Megan Walker: Beautiful. And what about feedback and getting customers involved in like the course experience and getting them part of the product creation?

What's, what's your thoughts there? Do you see that as a success factor as well in the ones who are doing well? Do they do more of that?

Will Winters: 100% and that really goes to the first and the last point of those points I just made. So the first one was to solve for pain points or create for pain points.

And being in constant conversation with your leads, your customers, even if they're just a part of who you expect your market to be. Having those conversations will illuminate the pain points and go oh maybe I'm not targetting a real pain point or it's something perceived, or maybe it's real, but it's not urgent enough or something like that.

And then again obsessing over your customers. There's no way to do that without talking to them. And this is something I've seen with you so much, is where you have something that it's successful, but you just want to keep improving it and keep improving it and keep improving it.

And no successful course creator or business that you see today is selling the thing, the exact thing that they started with, you know? Or if they are, there's great editions.

Megan Walker: So wise, it's not magic. I had a conversation with someone who was really struggling a bit (I'll just be careful that I'm not being rude about anything), but they were like, well surely I'll look at the market and I'll see what people are struggling with, let's say guilt. And I'm going to put a course out about that and I'm going to do the steps and I'm going to run ads and my course is going to sell and then I'll make lots of money. And I thought that's just an overly simplistic thought process of how it actually works.

But I can understand how they came up with that. Like you eluded at the top, we have had big names. Or the general sort of feeling that surely this must be easy. I just spit out a couple of lessons, put it on a platform, sit back and make money.

Will Winters: Yeah.

Megan Walker: But the person who takes that approach versus the one who is in constant conversation with their people, creating for pain, committing to experimentation and obsessing over customers, is such a different picture isn't it? And that's where the true success will come.

Will Winters: Yeah absolutely that's so good. And that goes to experimentation you know, in iterating on different ideas that you have because oftentimes what you see, someone who's wildly successful, it's not their first idea. You just didn't know the 10 ideas before that that failed because they're no longer doing them. So that's something really important to remember is that you're not seeing the offers that didn't work.

Megan Walker: Yes.

Will Winters: And then often if they're big and successful and kind of famous, their offers are simple because, they're at that level. Mm-Hmm. Like, you know, you aren't just teaching people digital marketing or course creation. Right. You have made your offer specific through the niche and all the unique needs of your specific niche, right?

Yeah. And so there's, there's a, there's a little more massaging that you have to do with your offer when you're beginning.

Megan Walker: I like it that we've myth busted. This is not a magic money machine, or money tree that we going to plant and love it. And let's talk about your thoughts as we bring the conversation back to the Kajabi platform itself.

 I love Kajabi. It makes my life so easy and I'm not being paid to say that. I just adore it and I think there's so much more that it can do. And I would never want people to think, oh that's just like WordPress or it's like Dropbox where I can just stick my lessons. And this is a whole, basically taking like a business that might be on a corner and putting it into the internet and it's a whole business solution. What are your top three tools in Kajabi that you think just make life so much easier for course creators?

Will Winters: That's good. And to go off your analogy about the business on the corner, right? There's so many little things you need to operate a business like product delivery, marketing, and there's all these things and Kajabi does put them in a really convenient package. And so I am being paid to say that Kajabi is great, but I've also used a ton of the other platforms including, you know, WordPress and stringing all these things together and just the level of complexity and expense is really wild.

So to get more specific about the three tools, my three favorites, at least right now, it is difficult because Kajabi does so much.

And I think depending on the strategy, you know, I might answer it differently, but for me right now I love our coaching product because literally without exaggeration, within minutes they can create a program and sell it for a lot of money because your time and expertise is more valuable than most digital products. And the time to market is less. So if you had an idea, wanted to create a whole course on it and sell it, that's great. Tons of people do it, tons of people make a lot of money. But there's just more barriers to getting started where you can have that same idea and coach someone through it.

We even have group coaching, so you can do one to many and you could set that up within minutes. So that's one. Great for busy consultations who are already doing it.

This is a new one and you've had some experience with it, and so it's different in different markets. But I'm still going to say Kajabi Payments. I love Kajabi Payments because it's helping our customers convert more. So there's a lot of payment tools that you can use out there. What Kajabi Payments does is it makes it really simple to provide a lot of different options for people.

So for instance, I buy a ton of things. On my phone when my wallet is elsewhere and rather than having to go and find my card and stuff, I can just use Apple Pay. A lot of times with more expensive offers it's great to have the option to buy it now but pay over time and we have that all in Kajabi.

It brings everything into one system. So you're not in Stripe over here trying to figure something out in PayPal over here, seeing why a subscription didn't link or whatever it is. With Kajabi Payments, it's all right there and we're adding stuff to it to make it better all the time. So that's number two.

Number three. Well I'll say one that we are in the process of launching right now, and that's newsletters. Newsletters are a great way for knowledge workers to share their expertise in an owned space, right? A lot of people will refer to social media as kind of like a rented audience.

You can have a post reach a thousand people and then you can have a post reach 30 people and there's no difference in the quality of the post. It's just the algorithm. It's just an accident of fate almost, you know? But having the newsletter tool kind of captures them so that you own your audience and can always reach them.

So that's really cool and it lives on the site so there's SEO benefits as well. So those are my three favorite right now. Kajabi Payments is commerce, but they're all kind of products. I love the products because you sell products.

Megan Walker: Yeah. So good.

I think as well, what's the customer experience you're creating? Like some conversations I've had is new people will be new to course creation. They're trying to keep the price down as low as possible. So they might choose a platform that seems cost effective while they're getting going but ends up costing more.

Not to pick on MailChimp, but when you hit 5,000 contacts, you actually pay more a monthly subscription than you would for a whole Kajabi subscription. And I look at it as well, I think we have to not go for what's cheapest, but what's the best experience for our students, our customers.

I bought a social media safety course on Roblox for my daughter. And the buying experience was really unusual. It came in an email I was buying from my daughter's school, so I thought that's fine. Clicked on the link, purchased it was only $39. But then a manual like email came from the company you have to send an email now to our administrator requesting this product.

And then it was a Dropbox link that I received and then there was a whole bunch of Australian digital security policies and guidelines around the National Health Organisation's guidelines around screen time. And I'm like, this isn't actually what I purchased.

It's messy, it's hard to digest, and it's doing me a, the buyer, a disservice. And then I unsubscribed. So they might have got a $39 purchase from me once, but they never got the $500 or the thousand dollars thereafter, and I didn't learn anything. 

 So when I hear people go, I want the cheapest option possible, I'm like, but that's not the best.

And you now have a $60 option anyway, so you can have one product while you're getting started. So that's even reduce the barrier to getting on Kajabi as well. Sorry I went on a soap box rant.

Will Winters: No definitely. The time to value, the ease of experience, the difference between what you'll realise is that selling a customer again, like in a subscription or an upsell or something like that, is far easier than winning a new customer. The data behind it is just crazy. I don't have it off the top of my head, but the experience really matters. That's why people buy certain things, right? That's why I pay extra for Lululemon shorts rather than going to target to buy shorts or whatever. It's because they feel good. The experience is good and that's why people keep their apple boxes. It's all the same thing. So with Kajabi, you have your website, your emails, your purchase, and then the delivery of the offer, whether it's coaching a course or community, all in the same place so that they get the value super easily.

I actually have a friend who's a coach and he makes a lot of money, but he's constantly stressed because he's just sending payment links and direct messaging zoom links and trying to say, what time are you meeting? And he's constantly on his phone.

I haven't seen his eyeballs in years because he's constantly trying to deliver his products, where if he had Kajabi, he could just look at his schedule, this is what's happening today. These are the links to pay a payment plan, whatever it is. So there's two things really.

You talked about the experience of your customers, which will make the lifetime value increase dramatically. And that's really what business is about. It's a lifetime value of the people you've won, but also it's your own experience. So that's kind of what I was getting at that coaching thing is like having, setting up the payment in Kajabi, setting up the checkout experience, setting up the product all in one thing. So you don't have to have a thousand tabs open. You don't have to make sure that they're all connecting perfectly. That's where I want to sometimes grab people and say, no, it's not worth it to string all these things together and or try to do it, whatever it is.

Megan Walker: Before doing coaching sessions through Kajabi, it would be okay, the person wants to do an hour coaching. Here's the Calendly link. Great we've got a date now I'll email you the Zoom link. Now I'll go into Xero and I'll raise an invoice and send that to you. And now we'll have the session and I'll record it in Zoom.

I'll upload that into Dropbox. I will send you a link to the Dropbox recording, and then I will chase your payment.

Whereas now I go here's the link. The person purchases, they book their time. I show up. The recording is in Kajabi, I send them the link and say, here's the replay, which they would've got anyway. Thanks for the session. The notes are in there. Have a nice day. Like it's just why would you do three hours of work when you can do it quickly.

Something I'm getting questions about from my students is who's the app best suited for the Kajabi app? Who should go ahead and, and go with that product?

Will Winters: The, the branded app is one of our newest offers. It's really cool. It's awesome. It's for anyone who's students have a smartphone, so essentially everyone. 

It's a different experience just being able to open your phone and consume content than going into the browser on your phone or having to be at your computer and desktop.

Now, when you're selling B2B, you might get away with. Offering just the desktop because people might be consuming it usually on the computer. But the app is just amazing. It also let's people experience your content while they're washing the dishes, going on a walk, something like that.

It adds a lot of legitimacy. I know that's kind of a vanity thing as well, but a lot of people are in the space now. They realise there's tools like Kajabi where within minutes they can have an offer up and out in the world. So the barrier of entry is lower to get into it, but setting yourself apart like hey we have an app that's completely unique to us because the branded app isn't just like we slap your branding on it a little bit. It's really customisable.

There's things that you can move around in there and create your own thing. So it's for everyone. Especially those who want to set themselves apart and elevate that customer experience and obsess over that.

Megan Walker: Amazing, okay I need one of them.

Any new features or benefits coming down the pipeline that you can hint at Will? What else has Kajabi got its eye on? Anything else cool and exciting? Are you sworn to secrecy?

Will Winters: We're always sworn to secrecy but there's also things I don't know about Hey this is launching in a week. Then there's things I'm told about that you know, take a while to build and roll that out. But we're becoming a really robust commerce platform. That's one of our goals. We've always had checkouts - they've worked and they've converted and there are eight figure businesses who use our checkouts and stuff. But they're just getting better and better to manage payments in there. The conversions are going up because of different features we're having. For instance, you can limit the amount of people who can buy an offer and display that.

It might seem like just a feature, but it's really sales power, you know? Creating different urgencies based on time and availability and quantity limits, stuff like that. So we're becoming an amazing commerce platform, and then we're also consistently adding new product types. 

Because it's more than people selling a course. Or more than a membership. They're selling coaching and simpler things like digital downloads, things like community. Which is the stickiest thing you can do. Maybe the most challenging, but the most powerful thing is selling a community.

Also more live stuff. More interactive stuff. What I call experience offers. When people talk about that they're often talking about a concert or something. But I think it's more difficult to sell. Just a video course - hey I have a video course for 400 bucks.

People still do that, make a bunch of money off of it. But it's a lot easier to say, hey I have a video course, plus we have these live calls, plus you can ask me questions and stuff like that. And I'm selling something that might've been $400 for $1200 bucks or whatever, you know? So yeah, we're, we're always adding product types and we're becoming a really great commerce platform.

Megan Walker: Yeah, I love that. I love offering clients those two options as well. When I first started getting into packages, I had an online course creator and it was $397 and people were asking what coaching goes with that? So I thought okay we'll have the $397 option and then I'll have one with coaching in it as well in a community and offer it for $997.

More people bought that so there's my testing done. Goodbye $397 product. So all of this testing, like you say, no business looks now how it did when it first started. So keeping that loop always going. Will, thank you so much for chatting with us. You give me continual support through Kajabi Access, which not many people might know about so I just wanted to ask you one sort of final question to explain what that is. And also I'll put in a 30 day free trial link below where everyone's watching this. If you're not yet on Kajabi, have a look. Have a look at the really simple one product only pricing. I think that's a game changer for people getting started.

But for others like me who like to have handholding or didn't want to get into Kajabi and feel lonely, tell folks about the coaching that they might not be aware of.

Will Winters: Yeah before I do that, I also want to say we have a ton of free support. Obviously email, live chat. We have a robust help center.

We have our own university with like marketing and strategy courses, tons of free resources. So I always tell people when they ask me that, I say we have a ton of free resources, but if you want to get further faster, you know we do have dedicated CSMs now. So Access is something that is a kind of sunset.

But we do have dedicated CSMs where you can now you're in Australia, so I am kind of like your dedicated CSM, but because of how the timing works in our schedules. But yeah, we have a dedicated CSM add-on where you can have regular calls and access via email to me or someone like me.

There's others like me. Maybe not as good, but no, I'm kidding.

Megan Walker: We give them grace.

Will Winters: Yeah, no the team's amazing. And then we also have an expert marketplace. Like maybe you don't need a consistent coach. Maybe you need someone to build out something for you and then be done, right?

So we have an expert marketplace where people can get Kajabi experts for copywriting, build out video editing all that kind of stuff. Or a VA, someone to work alongside you. So lots of ways to support as well as a designated CSM to get kind of a strategic partner.

I call myself a business buddy. Like I, I'm just there cheering you on helping you strategize and optimise the things that you're doing on our platform.

Megan Walker: So cool and so important to have a business buddy. Thank you for being mine Will and for chatting with us of course today. And your folks strongly, strongly, recommend Kajabi to all of you, everyone.

I'm drinking the Kool-Aid and we have a conference coming up. Kajabi's coming to Australia. Soon I'll be there with bells on. Did you know that Will?

Will Winters: I actually didn't. We were just in London. It's a different team. 

Megan Walker: Gold Coast, just down the road from me. I'll be there drinking the Kool-Aid.

I would also say to people if you are comparing other platforms, find out what the support is.

I did look at some funnel software earlier in the year and it would take like three days for people to get back to me. The time zones, there wasn't any support and I thought, it's actually not worth it. It was so stressful. Ask them how quickly they'll get back to you because I can ask anything of the Kajabi help desk and I'll get an answer really quickly. So that's a big thing when you are working in a new space, if you are left high and dry with a platform that you can't get answers on, that's very stressful. So that's another tip for new players.

Will Winters: Yeah. The culture in Kajabi is really dedicated to the success of our heroes. And that's why I love working there. I know it sounds corny to love working at your corporate job or whatever, but I love it. I think the culture is really great and it's genuine. We're really sincere and work hard for our heroes. So that's definitely something that I've heard before is, the language of obsess over our customers, that's like a value that's plastered on the walls and stuff that I, I stole that language from Kajabi because we obsess over our customers.

Megan Walker: Yeah, absolutely. And it's such a reframe, I used to spend the $70,000 on a lease and now I've got heaps of bolt on features so I'm $200 a month and that's my whole business doing four times the earnings without a lease.

It's such a great investment, like why wouldn't you? 

 Let's wrap it up there. Will, thank you so much for your time. It's been great talking to you. We will put some links below and see you all very soon. Bye.

Will Winters: Great talking to you.

 

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