It's true.

I am preparing to cancel my subscriptions to Convertkit, Podia, Wordpress, FlyWheel and Thrive Themes and migrating from Leadpages as well.

If you're like, holy shit, what is she leaving them all for...?!?!?!

I'm leaving them for Systeme.io. 🤯

(I know...have you even heard of it?? I hadn't...)

I think the official pronounciation is "system" but I keep saying it the French way like "sys-tehm". It started in France so I think that's why it's spelled like that.

I found it a few months ago because my dear bud/client/friend Rose Slam! Johnson was ready to graduate from Mailchimp and wanted to move into another platform for email, website & course hosting, sales pages etc and they asked what I use...

It was a tricky answer because my tech stack involves several apps and I definitely don't recommend the whole combination, it just happens to be where I am now based on where I was at the times I needed various new solutions.

The world of online course platforms has evolved SO MUCH since I launched our first online pickleball course in 2016...

(We used David Siteman Garland's CourseCats wordpress plugin and my ex is still paying a stupid amount of money monthly for it.)

I've been super happy for my decision to sign up with Podia two years ago for course hosting, but I don't love it as an all-in-one solution.

So I started doing some hunting to find out:

What is the the best all-in-1 solution now, TODAY?

I was willing to accept that there might be two answers, one being "the best at any price" vs "the best at a reasonable price."

But I wanted to know both answers, both for myself and to recommend to clients.

So, I did what I do, which is signed up for a BUNCH of trials and tried building something I actually needed to build in it to see how it works.

In my case, it was to build out some funnels to (finally) reach out to the pickleball email list I built with my ex to share/sell some of my own pickleball resources.

A dear friend of mine highly recommended Click Funnels 2.0 so I started there, but it just felt super overwhelming. Plus it was so expensive.

For $147/month, which is already high, I could only host 3 courses (I had 20-50 live courses and drafts in Podia at the time.)

And if I want an affiliate program (which I am not quite ready for yet but want to have soon) it costs a minimum of $197/month.

So for everything I want, I would have to pay almost $300 a month, which is WAY more than feels easy and doable for me right now.

Plus I do love HelloAudio but that subscription is $97/month because I have so many feeds on there and it all just adds up to a lot.

The short answer is:

I got EVERYTHING from ClickFunnels that I wanted from Systeme.io​FOR JUST $197 FOR THE YEAR on a Black Friday Special!!!!

And they will also migrate all my content from all my other platforms FOR ME, FOR FREE!! (I am resisting using as many exclamation points as I feel..)

And if I decide I need to scale to unlimited everythings, it maxes out at only $97/month!

Unlimited contacts, unlimited courses, pages, domains, everything...

​Systeme.io does everything I need it to do, in one place, for less than I am currently paying, and it won't cost more as my list grows...

I was so excited to find it and knew that I was going to want to spread the word, so I signed up as an affiliate for them, so I'll get a referral fee if you decide to sign up with them, but as always, I only ever sign up as an affiliate for things that I love and think you'll love to, so I'd be sending you this message whether they had an affiliate program or not.

Anyway, I started this out as one looooooong ass f*cking post, and then I decided to break it up into multiple posts but then I was like, that's kind of annoying, why not just let them keep reading?

After all, long-ass posts and emails are par for the course around here...

And I'd hate to disappoint, so...

Let's dive in...

To give you a brief overview, these are the apps I am currently paying for, how long I've been using them, what I use them for and how much I pay:

📷

Since April 2020 - Email broadcasts, Auto-responders, occassional product sales/payment processing (I probably would have used the product sales more but I hate that I can't duplicate a product and have to customize all the pages AND the checkout emails from scratch every time I create a new product.)​

ConvertKit COST: $29/month except this month I passed 1k subscribers and just saw they bumped me to $49/month

📷

Since November 2020 - for course/digital product hosting and payment processing, for some sales pages. I love it for creating courses and their website builder has improved a lot in the last couple years. I hate that now you have to pay extra to be able to bundle your courses. I don't like that the checkout pages are not very customizable, and the email capabilities were not up to snuff for my needs, tho they may be making some improvements lately.

​Podia COST: $33/month because I signed up on a Black Friday Special and got 15% off forever. Otherwise it's $39/month

📷

Since February, 2022 - I decided that Podia wasn't gonna give me what I wanted in terms of opt-in pages and funnels, so I thought I'd go back to managed wordpress hosting. (After getting our pickleball site hacked multiple times, I decided it's worth it to pay more for managed hosting.)

​FlyWheel COST: $15/month

📷

Since February, 2022 - I use this as my Wordpress theme and to create some sales pages. I started to use thrive ovation to track testimonials, but really haven't put the rest of the suite to good use.​

Thrive Themes COST: $99/quarter = $33/month​

📷

When I first launched The Mini Memoir Masterclass in 2020, before I found Podia, I created some pages in Leadpages. It was one of the few ways my ex was willing to let me use the resources and infrastructure I built for the pickleball business. Right now I think the main thing I have hosted there is my Authentic AF Brilliant Braveheart Award Page (which reminds me it's almost time to announce/award those! I do it in early Feb. Hit reply if you have any nominations for 6-, 7- or 8-figure+ business owners you feel truly embody authenticity!)Leadpages Cost: $0 to me because my ex is paying for it from the pickleball business (You know, zero cost if you don't count the $600k he has earned in the business in the past 6 years that I haven't received anything from. 🙄🙄🙄 Free leadpages is the least he could do, IMO...)

TOTAL COST: $110/month

This isn't bad overhead at all, but having grown a list to 20k subscribers, I know that the costs of ConvertKit will continue to ramp up as my list size grows. In the pickleball business, our simplero account costs about $350 a month on the months when we make no sales and more than that when we do (because they charge a percent of sales).I've evaluated a few times in recent years, but it always comes up as more expensive than I want to pay.

What I do NOT have (but get from Systeme.io):

I decided to try out Systeme.io to pre-sell sell an online course to my pickleball peeps.

Here's a screenshot of my Systeme.io dashboard at the moment. Those sales were really only from about 20 leads or so. The others are new signups that I haven't yet contacted at all.

It's kind of a long story, but I have my ~14,000 person email list from the pickleball business that I hadn't reached out to independently of my ex EVER, so I actually created sort of a burner account on SendInBlue to send those emails from since the list is a couple years old and I was writing from a new email address. Then I created an opt-in/sales funnel in Systeme.io that I sent people to from the SendinBlue emails.

Here is the list of funnels I've started so far:

This is one of the sale pages I created.

I was in kind of a hurry and really hardly put ANY time into it, so there are definitely some things about the design that I would improve, but it did what I needed it to do, and Systeme.io has some really gorgeous default templates.

The drag and drop editor was reasonably easy-to-use and customize.

I wanted to fall in love with deadlinefunnels but I just didn't like the software. I love that Systeme.io has deadline timers and redirects built in so easily. (Leadpages does too, and I can do them in Thrive Themes, but they aren't INTEGRATED with everything else like this is.)

I really have been missing having awesome looking checkout pages like I created for the pickleball business in simplero. I love the Thrive Cart pages but have never wanted to invest the $500 or so that I think it is to purchase for a lifetime (It's not the same company as Thrive Themes, which is confusing). I am super happy, however, with how this checkout page turned out in Systeme.io.

I've processed 20 sales and 1 refund so far for someone who accidentally bought twice. It was dreamy-easy, no big deal.

I also set up an online course, which is of course the product that I've sold on there.

Here's what it looks like from the user side, which I am pretty happy with, all things considered. (I've since fixed the strange emoji before the second sub-bullet point.)

There have been a few things that I haven't liked or find kind of annoying, but in the grand scheme of things they are pretty minor and the possibility of having everything else integrated in to one place makes it so worth it.

1. When You Make Edits to Funnel Settings or Such, They Don't Automatically Get Saved. ​

You have to click the easy-to-miss save button. I kept changing the URL or name and then coming back to find it reverted to what it was before until I finally realized this.

2. There is an Image Size Upload Limit

I can't remember exactly what it is. Maybe 5mb? But when I tried to upload images straight from my phone, they were too big. I wish it would let me resize them after uploading, but it's not the end of the world to resize before uploading.

3. You Can't Upload .mov Files without Converting First

This was annoying when I was trying to upload videos for my course directly from my phone. I had to find a website to convert them to mp4s.

Adobe Express is the best free one I've found that actually works even for files up to 2 GB without watermarks and such. https://express.adobe.com/tools/convert-to-mp4

4. There Seems to be a Menu Item Glitch in the Page Builder

I haven't yet rebuilt my website in Systeme.io but when I was playing around with it, sometimes the menu items seemed glitchy. I didn't have the time to try to figure it out or contact support, but it was annoying.

5. The Default Course Page Template Has Text

Every time I start an email or a new lesson page for the course, it starts with boiler plate text that I have to go through and delete before I can build mine from scratch. Again, not a big deal, some people might prefer that, but when I have a particular idea in mind of how I want it to look, it's annoying.

6. I Can't Hide the Menu Items Related to Physical Products

There are two items for physical products (old and new) plus the Orders item which seems to be for physical products because online sales don't show up there (they show up in transactions). I care more about the Courses, Bundles, Transactions, Students and Affiliate Programs so would rather have those easier to access but it's really not a big deal.

Maybe there are a few other things I forgot to note down, but there have been NO dealbreakers, and overall, for the price, the capability, the quality, I am blown away by Systeme.io.

Lastly, the reason that I am writing this email to you FROM ConvertKit still and haven't actually moved everything over to Systeme is because I am still waiting for their migration service.

When I bought the Black Friday special I got free migration service, supposedly of my ENTIRE business when I paid in full for the year of $197 for the Startup Plan.

(If you go to the website now, for the startup plan, it says they will only migrate something like 5 courses, but you'll see from the email I bought from, it said your ENTIRE Business.)

I contacted them to ask about it and then 2 or 3 weeks went by and I thought maybe they were just backlogged with orders, but then I found this email from them that I had missed.

So I responded the day after Christmas with all my login information and then got this response.

Obviously today it's been 10 days and I haven't heard anything back yet, but as far as I'm concerned, if it takes 6 weeks I'm still happy because I WON'T HAVE TO TRY TO TRANSFER EVERYTHING!!! 🤯🤯🤯

I just checked and I have 32 published courses in Podia right now, with about 10 drafted products.

Some of those have many lessons and videos.

Not to mention all 12 pages on my WendyGarrido.com website (here's my Wordpress pages dashboard)

I am still not even sure how it's going to be POSSIBLE for them to migrate all my pages and courses and everything. It sounds like a nightmare to me to try to lay out something in a new software without having the native files and such, but I'm curious to see what they come up with... 🤷🏻‍♀️

and anything they do will be work that I didn't have to do, so...

That's great.

It might take me a couple months longer than I'd hoped to make the full migration, but I am SO excited to have everything all in one place where I can scale to 20k, 50k, 100k subscribers and still just pay $97/month for everything.

It's insane.

****APRIL 2023 UPDATE****

Today was the first day I was actually able to start canceling some of those other subscriptions!

At some point I'll do a detailed timeline of things, but a small part of the delay was on my end, maybe 3 or 4 weeks worth, but the rest was on their end.

That said, it has been SO NICE to have the brunt of the migration work done for me!!

There are some typos, some buttons aren't live, and some of the photos are lower resolution than I originally had them, so I am definitely double checking the pages as I make them live, but overall, it has been fantastic to have pages just appear fully-formed in my Systeme.io dashboard.

****JUNE 2023 UPDATE****

I canceled Podia!

Alright, well, congrats if you're still reading this. 😉

I'd love to hear what you think after checking it out.

The only thing I know of that it might not do that might be a dealbreaker for you is if you need to require people to complete a quiz before releasing the next section of a course.

It might do that, but I don't think so. You'd have to look into it further.

Otherwise, please let me know what you think, what you like and if you find any features that don't work for you.

Big hugs,

P.S. -- I'd love to hear what you use and love, what you've tried and hated or whatever else you want to share. Just hit reply and let me know, or better yet, download the Telegram app and leave me a voice memo! I've got some pretty sweet convos happening over there lately and a new group thread I'll invite you to after you send me a message there.