Note: This transcript was auto generated then some poor soul sat and listened to it, and followed through correcting any mistakes they spotted. Please however expect human error and shout if you spot an issue. Email: lee [fancy curly symbol] trailblazer.fm.
Verbatim text
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Hi, and welcome to the WP Innovator podcast, the WordPress podcast for design and web agencies. Let’s make WordPress work for your business.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Hi, and welcome to episode 26 of the WP Innovator podcast. This is your host, Lee Jackson, and I’m super pumped to introduce this episode where we have Chris Badgett Not only is he a busy agency owner, but he and his agency launched Lifter LMS a few years ago and it’s gone from strength to strength. So this is a fascinating story and I highly encourage you listen through. Before we go on, can I encourage you to head on over to the Facebook group on leejacksondev.com forward/group. It’s a private Facebook group where there are other agency owners, web designers and WordPress specialists who are there to help each other out, ask questions and really just to create a safe environment. Now there’s 80 members now, that’s 80 members strong, which is awesome. And we’re already seeing people helping each other out.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
It’s so cool to see this happening. So head on over. That’s Lee JacksonDev.com group and without further ado, let’s crack on with the show.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Hi, this is your host, Lee Jackson, and I am in the house with Chris Badgett. Hi, everybody. How are you doing?
Chris Badgett:
Great, thanks for having me. Lee.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Hey, mate, it’s an absolute pleasure. Met Chris just a few weeks ago. He reached out to me over social media on the Twitter. You all know I live there, it’s kind of my second home, so it was great to connect. And he showed me his amazing product, which is the Lifter LMS product. Chris is also the co owner of Codebox, which is an online agency. They specialize in design and building websites. So, mate, you’re in the right place, you’re amongst the right people because we’re all either design agencies or web agencies.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
So welcome to the fold,
Lee Matthew Jackson:
mate.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Obviously, that’s kind of my brief introduction. Would it be really great if you could just say, hi, introduce yourself, give us a little bit background about who you are and your businesses? If I hand over to you for that?
Chris Badgett:
Absolutely, absolutely. All right, well, my name is Chris Badgett and I own a company called Codebox. Our flagship product is Lifter lms. LMS stands for Learning Management System, which is a way to build engaging online courses. So that’s what the product is all about. And then the client services side of our business is about really building custom solutions. On top of that, some quite large. And then kind of in the middle, we actually are Just now launching.
Chris Badgett:
We’ve already launched it, but we’re growing a productized service part of what we do, which is kind of like a hybrid between, you know, client services and a product ties and a product where it’s like a done for you white glove setup service with just a few options. So it’s not that custom. So that’s in a nutshell, what I do. I have two business partners. I didn’t start that way, but that’s where we are today. My company’s about 17 people strong. And in terms of life, I consider myself an education entrepreneur. I’m a digital nomad.
Chris Badgett:
I’m currently on this call from Taos, New Mexico. I’m traveling with my family. I have a wife and two little girls, and we’ve been constantly traveling for the past three months. Most recently we’re in California visiting my business partners and that sort of thing. So I’m really used to running a and my team is all over the world and most of them I’ve never met in person. So that’s a little background on who I am.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
That is so cool. Now you’re living the dream, buddy, because that’s exactly what me, my wife and little girl really want to do. The plan for next year is to actually trial that and spend a few weeks out there in Florida to see if I can kind of run the business digitally online, but also spend a whole lot of time as a family chilling together. And a lot of that was inspired by the four Hour Workweek. I don’t know if that’s a book you may have connected with.
Chris Badgett:
Of course. Yeah, I’ve read that one. And yeah, I’ve just been really into the digital nomad location independent business thing. I actually have a personal blog. I haven’t spent a lot of time on it in the past year or so because I’ve been so busy with my business. But it’s called Unconventional parents. That’[email protected] and I talk about my alternative approach to entrepreneurship and raising a family. And when we trialed the experiment of taking the business on the road, we actually spent three months in Costa Rica a couple years ago.
Chris Badgett:
And that was. That was a big win for me of that was back when I was just operating as a solo owner and I was able to pull that off. And that’s what gave me the confidence to keep growing and move forward.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
That’s so cool. Now, you’ve already set the background here that you started off as a solo entrepreneur with your business. How did you go about connecting with the guys who are now your business partners. And how did you kind of come to that realization you needed these guys on board?
Chris Badgett:
Well, it’s, it’s kind of what I would say is an incestuous journey. And what I mean by that is one of my business partners, Thomas, used to work for me as an independent contractor, as a developer. And then later Thomas and my other business partner, Joshua, formed the original code box and hired me as an independent contractor, as a project manager. And then over time, it just made sense to just smash our two businesses together. But I started out, this is five years ago at this point, just doing so I was doing it all myself. I used to think I was a developer and a designer. Now I know I’m not. But I’m what you would call a power WordPress implementer.
Chris Badgett:
So I’m the type of person they made themes and plugins for. So I started building sites for clients really cheaply. Like $200, $1,000, $2,000 or hourly, like $30 an hour with nothing more than putting together themes and plugins. Ultimately then I realized I need to hire a real developer to help me with these tweaks or when things break. And that’s where it all began. And to give you an idea of the trajectory of where we’re at now, we have clients all over the world. Some of our projects are in the six figure mark and it’s just grown substantially. Our hourly rate, we don’t do hourly work.
Chris Badgett:
We kind of have a discovery process that maybe I could talk about later. But if we build a project and then our clients roll into what we call our continuous improvement, they have to buy hours in advance. And effectively our hourly rate is $200 an hour. But I started out doing things for, for free and you know, 20, $30 an hour, that sort of thing.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
That’s so cool. And it’s actually quite important, I think, isn’t it, to not value yourself in hours, but actually to do that whole discovery process and then, you know, establish some sort of what is the budget? Or establish a budget and deliverables for that budget, rather than talking about hours, because that can kind of devalue what you’re doing.
Chris Badgett:
Absolutely.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Having a conversation the other day, you know, hours, it’s. It may take, you know, your business four hours to do something, but there’s also the value in there of the years of experience that your guys have had of geeking out, playing Xbox and also learning code all at the same time. Because men and women, we can all multitask. It’s scientific fact. We can, we can watch TV and code.
Chris Badgett:
Absolutely. Yeah. We kind of take an alternative approach with that discovery process. We charge for it. It’s. We charge $1,000, it includes three calls with the client. But you know, a lot of agencies might be eager to try to close the client, throw a number out there, throw an hourly rate out there and just get started. But we find that by getting the client to pay that thousand dollars up front, that obviously kind of like validates their ability to pay and their investment.
Chris Badgett:
And then we slow it down and we really scope out the details of the project and that allows us to put together a proposal with confidence with that instead of trying to rush it or do it for free, we want to put the incentives in the right place. So that’s why we do that. And even after our projects get going, especially the large ones, oftentimes there’s scope creep and that sort of thing which we totally embrace. And then we just have a really open and honest more time, more money conversation with the client and we add on to the project as we go. We’ve learned a lot and modified our process. And those of you listening or hearing how we’re rolling it, there’s some hard won truths in there. Encourage you to do paid discoveries and having a healthy relationship with scope creep.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Absolutely. It’s something that we implemented about two years ago, which was charging for consultancy because people would give you a brief and then kind of expect you almost to do all of that work for them for free and then maybe not even use you, maybe pass on all the work you’ve done, all those documents, the reverse brief, whatever that is, to some other developer and say hey guys, how much would you charge to build this? And you’re like what exactly? Here’s an interesting question then because this is definitely something that I know a lot of agencies struggle with. You know, they, they get a request for work in, there’s not necessarily a budget established. There is some flimsy kind of description of what is needed. You know, people make assumptions that if they say I need a clone of Facebook that everybody knows what you mean. Obviously we don’t normally get them in now and again now nowadays I think people have become a bit wises that. But you know, how do the people that are coming to you and you’re saying great, let’s do a discovery meeting for 1000 bucks. Do they have any idea how much something could cost with you? Have they already established that they have a budget or is it quite literally the conversation is we would like to create X.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
And we know you guys are good. Let’s start a discovery. And we’ve no idea at the end of that thousand books whether or not we’re going to be able to afford what it is you’re going to offer us.
Chris Badgett:
Yeah, the answer is it depends. It is not. I mean, we have a lot of repeat business from clients or friends or colleagues of clients that they kind of know what they’re getting into, if their project is similar to what their friend bought it for or whatever. But at the same time, as part of our sales process, the way, let me take it back to the beginning, we have all kinds of inbound, outbound and relationship strategies in our marketing mix. And it all starts with a 15 minute call to qualify the client and to tell them about our discovery process and that sort of thing. You know, it maybe have some email exchanges or that sort of thing before that, but then it goes to the call and then if they’re an objection, we hear a lot is before doing the discovery, I really don’t want to spend a thousand dollars if this is going to end up costing me some huge amount of money or whatever. So sometimes we will gut shot a range for the client, whether that’s, you know, 10 to 30,000 or 50 to 100,000 or 100,000 plus just to make sure nobody’s wasting their time. But we put a lot of disclaimer around that in the sense that we really can’t say for sure without doing our due diligence in the discovery process.
Chris Badgett:
But based on what we’ve heard so far, if I were to wager a guess, it would be in this range.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
That’s really good. It’s really hard, isn’t it, to be kind of drawn on some sort of estimate because if a customer or potential customer hears a number, that kind of gets embedded, doesn’t it.
Chris Badgett:
Yeah. That price anchoring is there. And the other thing I do is I’ve heard a lot of salespeople, myself included, say that their gut estimates are really good and quite frankly, I think it’s almost never true or you’re right 50% of the time. Yeah, so. So when I do give a gut shot, I’ve learned to really respect the. Not that I didn’t before, but respect the production team, especially the development team. And I, I basically, you know, work out that gut shot with them. So we’re like, we’re jointly looking at what we know so far about the project.
Chris Badgett:
So I’m not just being a sales guy and randomly throwing out numbers. I’m getting the team involved. So there’s some ownership in that gut shot. But if we discover something different and our price anchoring is way off, that’s just a battle we’ll have to fight.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Sure. But I guess as well, at the end of that discovery session, you could say, okay, well, our gut shot was based on we had these paragraphs of information conversation. But during discovery, we then found out we needed to consider a whole extra range of work. I guess as well, you’ve then got that kind of, you know, that to back you up, as it were, to say, hey, look, these are the prospective changes that have come in since you took on this discovery meeting. Am I right in saying that that’s the codebox VIP product that you guys put on your website, or is that something different?
Chris Badgett:
Yeah, yeah, that’s what that is.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
I like that. So you’ve actually kind of productized it in its own right and said, okay, if you want to kind of onboard with us, take on the code box VIP package, as it were, to get started. I like that.
Chris Badgett:
Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, we have a whole suite of offerings down from a free plugin. Our core plugin lifter lms is free all the way up to, you know, big custom projects. So we can hit. And then what we did, what we’ve done is we’ve really focused what it is we do on online courses. Learning management, systems education, entrepreneurs, corporate training. The kind of the place where WordPress education and technology and entrepreneurship overlap.
Chris Badgett:
That’s where we live. In the earlier days, we used to do a lot of stuff with infusionsoft and just various e commerce projects, other quite large custom development projects. But we’ve really been enjoying in the past year or so focusing in on this education niche.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
That’s really good. Niching down as well is such a great thing, I think for any agency. It helps you stand out, doesn’t it? Kind of.
Chris Badgett:
It absolutely does.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
This is what those guys do. We’re in your space, we get you, let’s work together rather than, hey, we’re one of everyone else who want your business.
Chris Badgett:
That’s such a cool story, I will say, I think it’s part of the freelancer’s journey. In the earlier days though, you got to take whatever you can get.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
I’ve done all sorts of sites. Yeah. Believe you me. Yeah, I remember that. It was a long journey as well for me to realize that niching down is so important. But I love again, on your website how you essentially have got that kind of four strands there’s four ways that we could work with you here. You’ve got your free plugin, you’ve got your Launchpad theme framework, which is pretty darn awesome from what I’ve seen. You’ve got that way of connecting with you as well.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
I just want to applaud you guys. I love this. I’ve spent months on my own website trying to work out how to put my message across simply. And I love this. So this is really cool. So thank you. There’s me loving on you over the interwebs. All right, so buddy, what, you know, over the last few years, then you said it’s been five years.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
What’s been the, that biggest challenge that you can remember to your business?
Chris Badgett:
Well, there’s, there’s several. You know, launching a client services business or an agency is difficult. But what I’ve found is now that we, when we launched a product lifter, LMS didn’t used to be free. It was a, we went out of the gate as a paid product. It was like $149 when we launched and we took our user base up to, we grew quite a bit at that point, but then we always knew eventually we wanted to disrupt the market and go free. And I’ll just say that building a product, like if you get respect and you have a good portfolio and you start leveraging those relationships, even if you do fixed price projects and that sort of thing, it’s easier to sell your time, even at high dollar per hour amounts or big project amounts, doing custom development work than to build a project or a product from complete scratch with totally bootstrapped with no outside investment. So just working that, doing the lean startup method of launching the product, building the email list, doing our early adopters, really bootstrapping it all the way to where it is today and just how that affects cash flow and that sort of thing is challenging. But I think, you know, we had to have a healthy client service side of the business functioning to help, you know, fund the development of the product side of the business.
Chris Badgett:
So making all that work out is challenging. But, so that’s a big one. Um, another one is, is, is attracting and keeping really good people and we’ve, we’ve learned a lot there. So I’d say if I had to pick two, that would, that would be our big two.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
I can really empathize with the product launch side as well. So I’ve written my own product which launched a few weeks ago, Sochi Press, and exactly the same. You know, I can definitely make more money as A business quicker by doing some sort of paid for development work, better website, better plugin, etc. For another client. And that’s pretty much instant and in. So I’ve found that I’ve had to really support the development of social press through that client services side of the business. And it’s a very slow process. I mean you kind of imagine you think I’m going to launch and loads of people are going to buy my product and it’s going to go crazy through the roof and we’re going to become like the agency all around this amazing product that we’ve created and then we’re to create more is this kind of excitement.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
But then at the same time I realized that I’m definitely going to have to, you know, it’s a slow burner and I’ve definitely got to keep funding that for now through the other half of my business or I should say the other 90% of my business which is obviously the day to day paid for work until this plugin starts to gain traction. So I can, I can definitely connect with that.
Chris Badgett:
Absolutely.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
That’s awesome. And on the keeping people then you mentioned keeping people, you said you learned some valuable lessons there. What advice would you have for someone who is taking on staff or growing agency taking on new staff? What sort of advice would you have there?
Chris Badgett:
Well, I’d say before I got into web development I have a background in leadership and managing companies and growing teams and that sort of thing that just being really having a focus on culture and, and hiring great people, as cliche as that sounds, is really important. And we’ve got, we have a, one of most of our people have been with us for years and but sometimes we, we’ve you know, hired a freelance developer that mostly it was in the development developer side of things where it just didn’t work out. And I think part of that is, you know, back in the early days we’d look for development help on like Upwork or Odesk or whatever and we still have some people like who do things like QA and some of our support help with our, on our product side that we manage all that through upwork. But in terms of like development for like the really complex product or client side work, we’ve learned that you really have to, to not try to get too much for too little. So our developers, we pay really well and when we hire contract developers these days, most recently we’ve actually been hiring a lot through Toptal. I don’t know if you’ve heard of that service but it’s not cheap at all. You need to have a really high hourly rate or, you know, your projects need to be built knowing that and bid out knowing that your development costs are high. But we’ve just found that, you know, you really want to just get the best developers and designers.
Chris Badgett:
They’re not going to be cheap, but you know, trying to split hairs to keep the cost down, it’s just not a battle worth fighting, is go find good people. And we’ve just had really good success with Toptal. So if, if nobody’s, if you haven’t tried that yet and you’re listening, it’s worth a try. They’re not cheap like in Eastern Europe kind of people. You’re looking around $50 an hour US based for a WordPress developer, you’re getting up around a hundred dollars an hour. So they’re, they’re, they’re not cheap. But my experience with them has been nothing short of exceptional.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
That’s awesome. I’ll make sure they go in the show notes, but I can’t recommend them enough as well. I know a lot of people who worked with people from Toptel. It’s just such a great concept, isn’t it, where you’re paying really good developers a good amount of money but you’re going to get the sort of service that you need, they’re going to deliver the results. And like you found, you know, if you’re trying to find someone on the cheap to do something, unfortunately I think it becomes kind of false economy in the end because you end up paying that guy to get so far and then you find someone else because he’s disappeared or not quite delivered. And before you know it, your costs have added up anyway because you’ve ended up having three or four people on the project to help you deliver something. And you’ve also really upset the client as well, which doesn’t help.
Chris Badgett:
Absolutely. Yeah.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
And I’m actually speaking from experience here. I’m just remembering with a shudder, I actually ended up working all night once just to do it myself. In the end I think it had gone through three different people and I was like, ah, forget it. And I just pulled an all nighter and had finished everything by 9am that morning and then had a full day of work to go. And I was thinking, right, right at that point, I am never going to do this again. I am going to build up those good relationships with people that I have to pay well. But you know, I know, I know they’re going to appreciate that and they’re going to do a good job. So yeah, Toptel.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Great space and great recommendation there, buddy. That’s awesome. So what I’d be interested in then is, you know, Lifter lms. Where did the idea for that come from?
Chris Badgett:
It was really organic. So back when I was a solo operator, I wrote a blog post about creating online courses and selling them with WordPress. And what I was doing is my wife and I were doing a project together. So I’m the web, the marketing guy and she’s really into organic gardening. So what we did is we created a, we wanted to start a little side business kind of in the vein of what you would say like a Tim Ferriss Muse project, a lifestyle business. My wife has a graduate degree in organic gardening and agriculture and that kind of thing. So we developed a platform called Organic Life guru that’[email protected] where we sell gardening courses and we took on a publisher mindset. So I asked my wife who is the number one thought leader in the world in permaculture, which is a niche within gardening, and she rattled off a name.
Chris Badgett:
I sent that guy an email and we got in touch and next thing you know we’re producing an online course for him. And that’s actually why when I mentioned I was in Costa Rica, I went down there to run my web agency. But also we went down there to film a two week permaculture design class with one of the leading experts in the world for our platform. So anyways, I created that [email protected] it’s just a WordPress website with a learning management system theme called Academy. And so, and I would blog about that, about my experience and how to create an online courses website and that blog. I’ve done a lot of blogging about a lot of things, but that particular blog post really started to take off. I started getting inquiries like, hey, can you build me a learning site? I started making some affiliate income off of my link to the Academy theme and themeforest. And I was like, there’s something going on here.
Chris Badgett:
And really for me, I was super passionate about that online courses, it wasn’t just because, oh, there’s a money opportunity here. Like, I love it. There’s something about doing it that I can’t explain it, but I’m really passionate about it. And over time, once I merged my company with my two business partners, we were just having a conversation like, okay, let’s make a. We, we all know we want to create a product also and not just do agency work. What’s it going to be about? And I lobbied hard for the online courses plugin, and it just evolved and we never gave up. And we kept pushing and launching it, and so it just. It came.
Chris Badgett:
The genesis of all that just started by me scratching my own itch using a LMS theme. And there were things I liked about it, things I didn’t like about it, and then finding a market opportunity and then doing a bunch of research and figuring out how we’re going to make something that’s even better. So that’s the story.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
That is a really cool story. So started off using something else, and then you’re able to establish, hey, I think these are the missing pieces of the puzzle. And I want to go ahead and create something that’s kind of going to bring all those together. And I got to admit, I mean, when you connected with me and I went and checked out Lifter lms, I was really impressed with what we’ve got going on there. It’s a very Rob And I was super impressed to see that you had the man of Yoast bigging you guys up on the front page. That’s pretty awesome. How did that happen?
Chris Badgett:
Absolutely. He just reached out to us. I mean, a lot of it’s organic. And also, I don’t know if you’re familiar with WP101. That’s another website that’s a WordPress training site that also runs on lifter LMS. Sean, the owner of that business, just wrote an article about lyftr. But some of it comes from relationships. Like, for example, I consider him a great mentor and thought leader and connector in the WordPress space.
Chris Badgett:
His name is Chris Lemma. Oh, he’s awesome.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Yeah.
Chris Badgett:
Yeah. So I’ve known Chris for a while and just started connecting with him on Twitter. I hired him for a clarity call. Like just some consulting around our product and stuff and our company. And then later, even last summer or. Yeah, last summer I went to Cabo, Mexico. Chris put on an event and there were some WordPress businesses there. And so that’s kind of like the relationship side of all that.
Chris Badgett:
But I think at some point Yoast just found out through talking to Chris or an article somewhere that laying out options and how different LMS and membership site plugins are different. And then YOS reached out to us. We opened him up a slack channel in our company, Slack, so that we could have direct communication with him, you know, about what he was trying to do, if he had any questions. He even contributed to the core code and some certain features. Around our quizzing that he wanted. And so it was just. It evolved organically but it definitely stems from staying in it, not giving up, building relationships, reaching out to people who you know or in who are in your industry and connecting with others.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
That is so cool. And it’s a common thread I think we found throughout. I mean we’re. I think you’re going to be episode 26. So that. Okay, 26 episodes in and one of the most common threads is relationships. You know, people have built great businesses off of the back of really investing in time in, you know, creating really good relationships, connecting with people and then they’ve seen so many things grow. If you’re interested guys, in checking out Lifter lms it is.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
There is a full demo on here. It’s demo.lifterlms.com. it’ll be in the show notes as well. But it’s L I F t e r lms.com and you go check out the demo. It’s really cool. I love how you guys have set this up. It’s actually the demo is a course all about Lifter lms. That’s pretty damn cool.
Chris Badgett:
It’s a course about making a course.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Exactly. It’s a course about making a course with the product that you’re offering here. And that’s pretty awesome. Again, just congratulate you guys on what you’re doing. That’s fantastic. You said from the get go you knew you wanted to disrupt the space and offer it for free at some point. What was the thinking behind that?
Chris Badgett:
Well, part of it is if you’re launching a product, you know, you need to get market penetration. So I mean, just from a business standpoint, you know, there’s very few plugins in the WordPress ecosystem besides like perhaps a gravity forms that’s like all premium, but some can pull it off. I mean there’s a big form market, there’s a, there’s a big page builder market. That’s why I know the guys behind Beaver Builder. What an awesome plugin. I love working with that one. I just built a site the other day with Beaver Builder and Lifter lms and as a Beaver builder, as a plugin Lifter LMS for the courses and then our theme launchpad and it’s amazing. But anyways, the LMS market is not as massive in the WordPress space as some of the other ones.
Chris Badgett:
So we knew we wanted to go free. There’s also like a big part of the world that can’t afford $100, $150 plugin that we still wanted to help and we, we’ve just seen a lot of other plugins do a good job with having a free front end and then like a pro version or whatever. Another example of that would be Events Calendar Pro or Events Count the Events calendar from Modern Tribe. Recently I just hung out with the one of the owners of that business, Shane Perlman. Great guy but yeah, I mean they have like I don’t their, their initial free plugin is like I guess the lead magnet or it’s, it just has tons of use and that fuels their pro product and then they also do client work and that sort of thing. So I could just detect a pattern. And so it’s a combination of you know, market opportunity, wanting to really serve the world and have it embrace the free and open source model and contribute something to the WordPress community and then also as a way to just build a, build a business because we know that the you know if our front end is free and then the back end of our business, the, the add ons, the pro support, the custom projects, the done for you set up white glove services which we call Boost. There’s plenty of money to be had that we actually make more money by making the plugin free by having a strong backend to offer.
Chris Badgett:
So if you are going to go free I recommend you put a lot of thought into what is going to be the back end. Like how are you going to function because you’re going to need to be able to not only afford to support and improve your free product but you’re also going to need to have it grow and be profitable.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
I see what you mean. So having as well in the back some sort of back office support that people could pay for as an extra add on that’s somewhere where you will still make money. So although obviously you’re providing everything now for free, there is, I presume you do have some premium add ons then do you?
Chris Badgett:
Absolutely. Just to give you an idea, just a good way to look at it from a mathematics perspective is 20% of the people who would purchase Lifter LMS when it was a paid product would then also buy our stripe add on so they could accept credit cards for their courses and memberships directly on the site and have Stripe manage all that. So by making it free the downloads just go through the roof and now a lot more people want the stripe add on. So that’s just, it’s not maintaining that 20% threshold but that’s, but knowing that that existed gave us the confidence to make it free and know that we still had a decently converting back end even just by looking at that one
Lee Matthew Jackson:
add on that is so beautifully simple and I kind of a bit speechless. It kind of makes sense. So you know, literally you’re having, you’ve got a smaller amount of people buying the plugin and then saying oh I need stripe now you’re opening it up so you know you’re allowing loads more people to download and conn with a plugin for free and they’re all going to have that same need where they want to connect with, you know, your mailchimp or your stripe add ons etc. Such a cool idea.
Chris Badgett:
Absolutely.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
I’m sorry to kind of I keep picking you up throughout this so I’m pretty sure you’ll have a very large head by the end of this podcast. But I’m just loving what you’re putting out there and I’m pretty sure you’re inspiring other people as well as me right now. Mate, that is so cool and like you said, simple maths but it’s not something I’ve ever thought of until you just said it right now.
Chris Badgett:
Well, I’m happy to share. And part of that is, that’s one of the beautiful things about the WordPress community is the openness and the sharing. And like I mentioned, I went to Chris Lemma’s mastermind retreat for WordPress business product and agency owners in Cabo last summer and so that’s like a Mastermind event and just really getting to know other people in the space and you know, sharing our challenges and opportunities and that kind of thing. So I just, I just think that’s one of the great things about the WordPress community is if you ask for help or you know, you’re looking to pick the brain of another business. I think overall, like it’s a more open, it’s more open than a lot of other spaces in the technology space. It’s one of the things I love about it. So I’m really happy to share and pay back all the great wisdom and case studies and advice I’ve gotten from others too.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
I saw some. Well just on that then we’ll make sure in the wrap up that we tell people how to connect with you. But just quickly, if someone’s like I really need to send this guy a message right now, what’s the best way of getting in touch with you?
Chris Badgett:
It’s just [email protected] c h r I S at Lifter L I F T E r l m s.com and that’s what I just want to mention. That’s one of the things that makes our brand different. And people say it’s is we’re approachable. I’m happy to give out my email address if somebody wants to email me. And our pre sales channels, like we talk to people. We have a podcast about our niche, it’s called LMScast. But that we also take those episodes and put the videos on YouTube and on our podcast website and that sort of thing. Not just itunes, but it’s really easy for people to see the face and get and communicate with us.
Chris Badgett:
We don’t hide behind the website and we get that feedback a lot that people appreciate how approachable we are, how authentic we are and that kind of thing. I love it.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
And the video podcast is something that I’m wanting to get into. Unfortunately, this sound in this room is terrible. So I have to actually sit under a blanket, which means I actually can’t. I can’t actually do the video yet because otherwise people would just kind of see this weird ghostly shadow of a face of the screen reflecting in my glasses. Just feel so awkward.
Chris Badgett:
Well, for what it’s worth, our original videos are terrible. Even just this microphone I’m using right now, we just started. Joshua, one of my business partners, he converted his closet into a podcast studio. So I think we’ve been on the continuing journey to improve the quality of our videos and audios and that sort of thing.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Well, I’ve started doing videos, but they’re just me out and about. Whereas I’d love to actually kind of have the multi channels and do the podcast as both a video and. And obviously audio. In fact, it’s funny you should mention the closet because episode 25, which is going live, obviously will already be live by the time everyone’s listening. But the lady, Cheryl Tan, who I interviewed there, she was actually sat in a closet.
Chris Badgett:
That’s awesome.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
It is. She’s the first person I found who was actually sitting in a closet. Because I’d heard a rumor that that’s. That was what people did. But I was like, no, surely not. No one sits in a closet. But hey, it’s real. It ends.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
And I think it would be better than suffocating under a blanket like I’m doing right now.
Chris Badgett:
Absolutely. Well, people say, people say that they appreciate like seeing us. They feel like they already know us because they’ve seen some of our videos and that sort of thing. So that’s so cool.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Mate, you are dropping value galore. And I’m loving this. You’re teaching me every second of the day. Hey, is there any online resource like a website, a blog or anything like that that’s that you guys enjoy or even a Facebook group that you’re a part of that you reckon people should go ahead and check out?
Chris Badgett:
I really enjoy. You’ve heard me mention Chris Lemma. He has a great blog that and he does a lot of content around e commerce and membership and elearning and learning management systems, that sort of thing. So I highly recommend Chris’s blog. He’s also blogs about running a company in the WordPress space and that sort of thing. So he’s, he’s great for me. Let’s see. I listen to a lot of podcasts.
Chris Badgett:
I really like Carrie Dill’s Office Hours fm and I’m actually quite the avid podcast listener. So I’m just trying to think of some of the ones out there. Of course I like the Tim Ferriss podcast. I like Dave Asbury’s podcast, Bulletproof Radio. Just pulling up my podcast app here to look at some of the other ones.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
See what I’ll do is I’ll edit in later with a very fake American accent. The WP Innovator podcast.
Chris Badgett:
There you go. Hack the entrepreneur is a good one that somebody told me about. The top is a good one. I’m an old school James Shramko fan, so super fast business from Australia. Sweet mixergy from Andrew Warner Podcasts. It’s a really interesting thing in this world we, this space we live in is doing agencies and product work. We have a unique gift, we have a unique talent which is that we are creators and producers. So the balance, it’s important to have a healthy balance between production and consumption.
Chris Badgett:
This is a really abstract statement, but for me, I have to invest so much creative energy in building a business and helping build client projects and a product that I have, my consumption is actually very low. Like I spend a lot of time in, in the wilderness and traveling and doing things with my family and, and helping bring new experiences to my kids. But the, the podcasts are really my secret weapon for, you know, learning new things and just trying to get some, some, some new wisdom and new ideas or refresh old ideas.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
That’s awesome. Good, good advice as well. So if you’re out in a room, take a podcast with you and we’re gonna get all of those podcasts noted down and in the show notes as well. That’s Larissa. She’ll be listening back to this and she’ll be getting those Amazing show notes that you guys enjoy so much, I’m sure. Mate, that’s. That’s freaking awesome. We’re kind of coming up to the end of our time limit now, which as everyone knows is 40 minutes because that’s usually the average commute.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Although I feel sorry for the guy who only has a 10 minute commute because he’s missing most of the show. But we like to wrap up with kind of a piece of advice from yourself, something that you feel that businesses, design agencies, whomever could apply to their business today or to their life today that you really feel will start to make a difference. And then if we can just wrap up with how we can all connect to you.
Chris Badgett:
That sounds great. Well, I’d say the biggest piece of advice is to just keep going and focus on incremental improvement. And I’ve heard it somewhere recently. It’s not my quote, but we often overestimate what we can do in a day, but underestimate what we can do in a year. And a lot of that progress comes from staying in the fight and focusing on continuously improving. And part of that improvement process that’s been a big when for me is just learning how to delegate and build your team and create partnerships and not trying to go at do it all alone. Once you can get through that and maintain profitability and continue to scale that, that’s where the real exponential growth happens. So that’s my word of advice.
Chris Badgett:
If you’d like to find me and more about what I’m up to, just check out lftrlms.com and if you want to hear me rattle on with my business partner Joshua about creating online courses or learning management systems or our membership sites with WordPress, check out lmscast.com and we’re also in the, you know, the itunes store and stitcher and all that other stuff too.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
That’s amazing, mate. Thank you so much for your time. It’s been an incredible podcast. Just listening to your story, listening to what you’ve learned, and the advice you’re dropping left, right and center. I’m honored to have you on the show and I feel like I’ve learned so much from you. So thank you so much for your time and just have a freaking awesome day, mate.
Chris Badgett:
Awesome. Well, thanks for having me, Lee.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
No worries. Take care of yourself.
Chris Badgett:
Cheers.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Well, that wraps up episode 26, and all that’s left for me to say is thank you so much for listening. Don’t forget to head on over to the first Facebook group. That’s leejacksondev.com group and also I really love to hear from you all. So there’s me, Larissa, Karthik, and many other people that are involved in making this podcast what it is. And we’d love to hear your comments, your thoughts, and your feedback. So head on over to leejacksondev.com contact to get in touch. Let us know what you think, what you would like to hear, maybe even tell us what you don’t like. But say it really, really nicely so that we don’t all burst into tears.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
That would be super great.
Chris Badgett:
Thank you.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
And until then, we’ll see you next week on the WP Innovator podcast. Keep Innovate.
Chris Badgett:
Sam.
