Learn how to launch products, create recurring revenue, and build an affiliate marketing program with Mark Thompson from PayKickstart in this episode of the LMScast podcast hosted by Chris Badgett of LifterLMS.
PayKickstart is an eCommerce subscription management tool that also manages your affiliates. Chris and Mark relate on the topics of software technology marketing and solving problems, so this episode has a great discussion on those topics.
PayKickstart’s goal is to take the technical hurdles out of running an online business, so not only do they manage recurring payments, but they also work with customer communication and notifications to help manage churn, get feedback from customers deciding to leave your program, and keep people engaged.
One great point Mark makes is that if you don’t address an issue with recurring revenue churn and you’re churning about 30-40% per month, there’s no point putting more effort into marketing on the front-end if you’re losing customers out of the backend.
Mark shares some great tips for keeping affiliates engaged with your program and sending over leads/referrals. Rewarding affiliates for leads and not just sales is one way you can do that, possibly offering $1 per lead. You can also work with affiliates to make it as easy as possible for them to promote you to their list. Providing resources, articles, or sales copy templates, are great ways to make the affiliate process as frictionless as possible.
A key point from this episode is that the most successful product launches have a front-end one-time offer and then a few upsells on the backend with at least one of those being recurring.
To learn more about Mark Thompson and the things he has going on at PayKickstart, be sure to check out PayKickstart.com. On their pricing page they have a free trial of all of their plans for 14 days. And after signing up there’s a step-by-step guide on getting your first product live, so be sure to check that out.
They also have resources and quick-start guides that you can print out and follow the steps. And they have live chat, so feel free to get in touch with them through that channel as well.
At LifterLMS.com you can learn more about new developments and how you can use LifterLMS to build online courses and membership sites. If you like this episode of LMScast, you can browse more episodes here. Subscribe to our newsletter for updates, developments, and future episodes of LMScast. Thank you for joining us!
Episode Transcript
Chris Badgett:
You’ve come to the right place if you’re a course creator looking to build more impact, income, and freedom. LMScast is the number one podcast for course creators just like you. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co-founder of the most powerful tool for building, selling, and protecting engaging online courses called LifterLMS. Enjoy the show.
Chris Badgett:
Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. My name’s Chris Badgett, and I’m joined by a special guest, Mark Thompson. He’s from PayKickstart, which is at paykickstart.com. It’s an ecommerce subscription management and affiliate platform, and it does a lot more than just that. Welcome to the show, Mark.
Mark Thompson:
Thanks for having me, Chris. Appreciate it.
Chris Badgett:
I’m super excited to get in to it with you. So, we’re a couple of software technology marketing geeks who like to solve problems for people who have membership sites and subscription recurring revenue business models. So, this is going to be a really good fun discussion. There’s going to be stuff in here if you’re an advanced entrepreneur, but also if you’re just beginning, there’s going to be a lot of gems we get into.
Chris Badgett:
One of the places I wanted to start with, with you, is one of the dirty little secrets of the membership site and online course industry is that, one, people buy stuff and they don’t complete it, but two, if you have a recurring revenue business charging monthly, which is the most popular, people just kind of disappear. And the course creator, the entrepreneur, doesn’t necessarily talk about it or they’re in denial and that what’s really happening is they make a bunch of assumptions and they don’t know why people are leaving. You developed some stuff at PayKickstart to help with that part where people cancel. What does your software do and can you speak to that problem?
Mark Thompson:
Yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, what we do is we really try to take the technical hurdles out of running an online business. And so, our sweet spot are exactly kind of your same customers. So, anyone who’s running a membership site, or you have a software company, or you’re looking to manage recurring payments, that’s really who we help. And so, we do everything from easily accept payment with Stripe or PayPal, ACH transfers, whatever it may be, and then also be able to manage the subscription, right? And that’s everything from customer communication and notifications as well as handling churn.
Mark Thompson:
And so, kind of what you’re talking about with churn, everyone deals with it, right? It is one of those dirty little secrets where there’s a misconception where people think you need more traffic, right? “I need more eyeballs on my website,” when in actuality most people have a churn problem, right? Your churn’s 20, 30, 40% and you’re churning it month over month and you could keep driving more traffic. But, at the end of the day, if you’re not fixing your churn problem, then there’s no reason in spending money on driving traffic.
Mark Thompson:
And so, one thing that we’ve really tried to hone in on is that problem with churn. And so, there’s involuntary churn and then there’s voluntary churn, right? Involuntary churn being your credit card fails, it declines for some reason or the credit card expired and updated their billing details. So, we have a dunning sequence that allows you to reach out to the customer and say, “Hey, go and update your billing details.” So, a lot of that stuff will help with involuntary churn.
Mark Thompson:
Then there’s voluntary churn, right? There’s people that want to cancel. And most people that are running membership sites or recurring businesses, they don’t even know the reasons why they’re canceling, right? Or, they don’t have a way to capture the feedback from the customer that’s canceling. And so, one thing we’re actually working on right now is kind of a cancellation saver sequence where you actually go and ask them, “Hey, well, why is it that you’re canceling?” And we’ve found that if you just find out why they’re canceling, there’s a good chance that you can overcome that objection and save that sale.
Mark Thompson:
And so, whether it’s a pricing issue and maybe you have different plans or pricing for someone that’s saying, “Well, it’s just too expensive for me right now. Is there a way that you can offer me a discount or a different plan that suits my business?” Or, “It was just too difficult. I didn’t understand how to get started.” Well, in that case, having a call to action to say, “Well, chat with us. Our customer success team is there to help you out.” So, it’s important to understand what the reason is that they’re canceling and then be able to overcome those objections and come up with a solution to help keep them and save the sale.
Chris Badgett:
Yeah, that’s super cool. Let’s talk about that, the thing that people want, which is more eyeballs. One of the ways that people want that is by building an army of affiliates or whatever.
Mark Thompson:
Yeah.
Chris Badgett:
What does PayKickstart do? How does it work as an affiliate platform? Because, people in this space, they typically look at something like a WordPress plugin like AffiliateWP, or they look at a hosted affiliate program like ShareASale or Commission Junction or something like that. But it’s sort of a separate thing. It’s a bolt-on. How do you see or how did you develop your affiliate system for PayKickstart?
Mark Thompson:
Yeah. So, I think that’s one of our competitive advantages and one of the reasons that people use our platform is just because of how robust the solution is, the platform is, and how much functionality there is. So obviously, we are a shopping cart so we can handle accepting payments and everything from the payment and checkout experience. But we’re also a full blown affiliate platform, so it’s kind of an all-in-one solution. You don’t need to duct tape multiple plugins or apps to get it working. It’s all kind of integrated out of the box.
Mark Thompson:
And so, it’s just so advanced. So, obviously you can track commissions for a sale. You can also track commissions for a lead. So, one thing that we’ve noticed a lot our vendors do is they’ll do things like prelaunches or they’ll do webinar signups or anything where you’re trying to generate a lead. And affiliates don’t really like to promote those types of offers or a lead generation because they’re not getting compensated for it until they actually make a sale. So, one thing you could do is offer $1 per lead or whatever you want that to be for affiliates generating referral leads to you.
Mark Thompson:
So, that’s really nice. You have the flexibility of both compensating your affiliates for a lead as well as a sale. Then also, affiliates like to have marketing materials. They like to have promotional materials like banners and email swipes. And so, we actually have a built-in marketing area where you can load in all of these marketing materials and have your affiliates be able to access them easily right from within the platform. So, they have their own single sign in where they can log in, they can promote your product, grab their affiliate links, grab their marketing materials. You could even do a contest like realtime leaderboards if you want to make an event out of it, where affiliates can go and promote your product and you can offer incentives for those who are your top affiliates. And you can have them see a realtime leaderboard, which incentivizes them more to promote your product. Another thing with affiliates, you kind of need to understand the DNA of an affiliate. They’re doing it to make money.
Chris Badgett:
Right.
Mark Thompson:
Nine times out of 10, right? Obviously, some of them have actually used your product and believe in it, but a lot of the times they’re trying to find high converting offers that they can promote to their list and still add value. But, at the end of the day, they’re trying to make money from it. This is how they make a living. And so, offering instant commissions is really a nice feature to have with an affiliate program where, when they promote and they make a sale for you, they get paid at the point of sale, which is really nice. And it’s a nice incentive for affiliates that continuously want to promote you because they get that realtime gratification. So, there’s just tons of flexibility with the affiliate platform. And again, it’s all integrated seamlessly with the shopping cart.
Chris Badgett:
That’s awesome. And I love that all-in-one approach because, oftentimes people are doing a different E-commerce solution, a different affiliate tracking management solution and then a different system for using a CRM or something to deliver swipe files and graphics and things like that. So, just having it all integrated and designed around in one house makes a ton of sense.
Mark Thompson:
Yeah. One thing I want to add is, so we kind of stopped at the shopping cart and affiliate management. We could go in and try to be an email automation tool, a membership site. At some point you need to say when and say like, “Okay, we want to focus on being the best at this.” And that’s really what we focused on. And so, we’ve integrated with a number of third party services that you do use. So, with LifterLMS we have a brand new integration that we just added this week, I guess depending on when you guys see this. But anyways, it’s available.
Mark Thompson:
So, it just offers seamless integration where when someone purchases from your checkout page, it can automatically add them to a membership level. You could even tag them and add them to your email marketing solution for future follow-up. It just makes things so seamless and automated where you don’t have to worry about, “Well, man, I guess if they want to upgrade to a different membership plan, they’re going to have to contact our support team.” Or, “If they need to upgrade or update their billing details, they’re going to have to contact our support team.” And it just becomes a customer service nightmare when instead, if you have a seamless integration, it can handle all of that and it can be automated.
Chris Badgett:
I love that. I’m often talking about WordPress. It’s like all the power and flexibility without the hassle. LifterLMS is an all-in-one solution. It has some E-commerce. It can send some transactional emails and behavioral based things based on behavior in the courses and whatnot. But, at the end of the day, we’re mostly a learning platform and it is a all-in-one solution, but if you want to do more advanced stuff like what you’re talking about with a really robust affiliate program or on the E-commerce side of things like seamless upgrade, downgrade between membership levels and stuff like that, then you can integrate out the best solution.
Chris Badgett:
So, I think the reality with software like you’re saying is, you could have kept going and just created an online business in a box. But sometimes there’s things where you do the all-in-one and there’s things where you integrate with best in breed. If I’m thinking about a power user using Lifter who’s going to do advanced marketing and sales, they could use PayKickstart. They would use Lifter for the LMS, the membership site, and maybe something like ActiveCampaign for the actual marketing automation and broadcast tool. So, be minimal. It’s easy to go crazy with tools, but often the best solutions involve a few key integrations.
Mark Thompson:
Yeah. You see this with a lot of businesses, right? They get feature happy and they want to spread themselves thin. This happened with ClickFunnels just recently, right? We love ClickFunnels. I mean, the guys there are great. They have a great landing page builder, but they tried to do too much. Now they’re kind of backpedaling because what happened was, all these new businesses that they’ve created, they have a CRM, and they have an email marketing solution, and they tried to create an affiliate platform, all this stuff, they didn’t have the resources to make sure that it was the best of breed in the marketplace. And so, they’ve kind of gone back now to their bread and butter of, “Hey, let’s be the best landing page builder and funnel builder we can possibly be.”
Mark Thompson:
And so, in your scenario, obviously your bread and butter is the learning side of things and, yes, you do have the shopping cart. For some people who you just need a basic way to checkout, that can be totally fine. But if you’re looking for something more advanced, if you need one-click upsells, if you want order bumps, if you want more flexibility with your checkout pages or checkout widgets, that kind of stuff, then that’s when a lot of people will come to us and they’re happy with a solution like that we provide.
Chris Badgett:
That is awesome. Well, you also have some interesting optics on people using your software of what’s… You’re probably recognizing patterns of things that people who are successful with your tool are doing. So, I have some questions around that. I get asked this question, so I’m going to ask the expert.
Mark Thompson:
Okay.
Chris Badgett:
People ask me, “What should I charge in terms of affiliate commission for my digital course or membership site?”
Mark Thompson:
Yeah, that’s-
Chris Badgett:
“And should I do recurring or one time? Or, how do I do it?”
Mark Thompson:
Yeah, that’s a really good question and it’s kind of a loaded question so you kind of have to dive into it. So, a lot of it depends on your position in the marketplace and kind of what your clout is, right? So, if Slack or one of these mainstream software applications wants to create a membership or an affiliate program, they have so much clout in the space and people naturally use it as kind of the backbone in their business, that they have the ability to offer a lower commission. So you’re going to see mainstream-
Chris Badgett:
Like an Amazon affiliate commission which is like 2% or something.
Mark Thompson:
Yeah. I mean, Amazon is probably the lowest. I think it’s like three to 6%.
Chris Badgett:
Yeah.
Mark Thompson:
But they can do that, right?
Chris Badgett:
Right.
Mark Thompson:
Just because they have all the traffic already. When you look at these mainstream SaaS applications, a Slack, a Freshdesk, any of these big guys, Salesforce, they usually give about 20% because they can, right? It’s not their sweet spot. It’s not their main focus on getting it. But if you’re just starting out and you want a inexpensive way to drive traffic to your offers, then that’s when affiliate marketing is such a great tool. It’s free, right? It’s free traffic. You’re only compensating them when they actually make a sale. But the trade-off is that you need to give them a higher commission.
Mark Thompson:
So, usually the norm is anywhere between 30 and 50%, okay? If you’re just starting out and you want to get affiliates on board, obviously the higher up you can go, the better. But then obviously, you have to juggle your expenses and make sure that it’s affordable. You could obviously lower that as you start to be more known in your marketplace and you have other traffic generation techniques that are reducing the cost per acquisition, cost for a customer. So, anywhere between 30 and 50% is kind of the industry norm. As you start to grow and start to scale and affiliate and you don’t have to rely so much on affiliates, you can start to back that off. But it’s always good to have that affiliate program because it’s just one spoke in your wheel of driving traffic.
Chris Badgett:
That’s awesome. Well, just to share my experience with affiliates as a software company, I have somewhere around 600 affiliates. Of those, maybe 60 have made sales. And of those there’s five or so power affiliates. Is that like a normal distribution?
Mark Thompson:
It is. It is.
Chris Badgett:
Okay.
Mark Thompson:
The 80/20 rule definitely kicks in here.
Chris Badgett:
Good.
Mark Thompson:
And so, what you want to do is recognize who those power affiliates are and help them out as much as you can. So obviously, build personal connections with them and figure out other ways that you can integrate your product into their business. There’s many affiliates who are not just affiliate marketers, they’re also vendors, they’re also selling their own products. And so, figure out other ways because if they’re making a lot of sales from you, there’s obviously a good cross pollination of customers here. So, figure out ways that you can integrate your product into their business.
Chris Badgett:
That’s great. Another just optics question I have for you, we see a lot of people and we encourage it too, before people go into what I call the ‘course creation cave’ and spend two years making something, we encourage people to presale. How can people presale with PayKickstart or, I guess, how can they presale and what do you see in your customer base of people who kind of validate well and get traction and get money early and often?
Mark Thompson:
Yeah. So, I don’t know if this is necessarily a PayKickstart solution. It’s more of just like, how do you gauge the audience and know that you have kind of a minimum viable product that when you do create that out of the gate that people are going to want it? And so, I think a lot of it is market research, understanding your audience, asking a lot of questions, sitting on the sidelines and just seeing what pains people have, looking at your competitors to see what they’re doing and seeing if they’re successful or not and what parts of their business are successful.
Mark Thompson:
So, for a lot of membership sites they do coaching as well. What type of coaching are they doing? Are they doing group coaching? Are they doing one-on-one coaching? What medium are they using? Is it online? Are they doing events? If you have an older crowd, older crowds still like to do in person events. If you have a younger crowd, maybe virtual group coaching is easier. So, I think a lot of it is sitting back on the sidelines and learning more about who your audience is and then also being proactive in social media, on Facebook groups and LinkedIn groups and just asking questions about, “Hey, I’d love to know, what are some of your main challenges?” and building out your course around what those challenges are. Then even saying, “Hey, here’s what I’m looking to build and here’s kind of the core training I’m going to have. Then outside of the core training we’re going to be doing discussions and that type of stuff and here are the different topics that I wanted to talk about. Is this something that you’d even be interested in?”
Mark Thompson:
If you’re getting a lot of people saying, “Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes,” well then, build a list of those people, start to talk to them. Then once it is ready, go to your first customers and say, “Hey, I would love for you to dive in here.” And even if you give it away for free for the first 10 people or just say, “Hey for a hundred bucks,” or whatever, “you can get access to this,” just so you can get those first few customers because that’s what really gets the ball rolling and then that’s your voice, right? That’s the person that you want to listen to and say, “Okay. Well, I’m on the right track with this. I’m not on the right track with that. People like this content better than this content and I need to go and create more content around this particular topic.”
Chris Badgett:
Well, you’re on a roll, so I’ll just ask for more. What other kind of launching strategies do you have or you see some of your customers using effectively that maybe aren’t obvious or are counterintuitive?
Mark Thompson:
So, we’ve done tons of different product launches and what’s really powerful about a product launch is it can catapult a business to kind of immediate success. You can build that MVP and get customer validation very, very quickly. And so, we’ve done over a dozen product launches. We’ve generated six figures in a week. We’ve done over seven figures in a week as well. And so, the DNA of a good product launch is obviously building awareness. So, I would definitely recommend having some prelaunch buzz just to build awareness of what your product is, get people talking about it, get people excited about it. Then obviously getting your affiliates on board as well. So, creating an affiliate page or a JV page that really, that’s a sales page to your JVs, right? So, it’s a sales page to your affiliates telling them why they should promote you. There’s lots of different offers out there. What makes your product so special? How are they going to make money? And how are they going to build value when they go and tell their customers about it?
Mark Thompson:
So, having that affiliate page that sells your product, giving them all the details and making it super easy for them to go and promote you, so when you do open that cart, it’s very easy and you can get a flood of traffic and a flood of sales in a short amount of time. And you can build urgency into that product launch. So for those of you who are just starting a brand new business, getting those first early adopters is so crucial to get that momentum with your business. And so, even if you do have to offer it at a discount or maybe you offer it at a onetime fee and then on the back end in your sales funnel, you have some sort of recurring model on the back end.
Mark Thompson:
One thing that I’ve seen a huge mistake with people launching a new business or a new product is they get stuck in that onetime pricing model where they get a whole bunch of sales up-front, they get a lot of revenue up-front and they have no recurring revenue. The sales go up and then it just dives. It just takes a nosedive and there’s no momentum built after that launch. It’s kind of a lose-lose situation because the customer loses out because they’re not getting the benefits of the product long-term and the vendors, they’re losing out because they’re not seeing long-term revenue.
Mark Thompson:
So, that’s why I always feel like the recurring model is so popular and if you can align the value with your product, the customer value with your product, then it’s a win-win for everybody because they’re happy to pay you every single month or every year because you’re providing ongoing value. And whether it’s a software company adding new features or it’s a membership site and you’re offering more training and coaching. So, make sure you build in some sort of recurring revenue, whether it is on the front-end. Usually when you’re doing a product launch, you want to offer a onetime fee on the front-end so you can get that initial customer, and then upsell them into recurring on the back end.
Chris Badgett:
Wow, that’s a gold mine right there. So, you’re saying a product launch is a good thing to do, but make sure you have a back end, a recurring revenue model. Let’s say I have a transformational course, like a big 500, 1000, $2,000 course or whatever, but then maybe there’s a membership on the back end of that that’s $300 a month or $30 a month, $100 a month, $500 a month, whatever it is.
Mark Thompson:
Yeah. Yeah, and especially when you’re working with affiliate partners, the trick to get them to promote you is to have a high converting offer. Now, one of the problems with doing a product launch is that product launches are usually done in a short amount of time, like a week or 10 days, and it’s very hard to get someone to buy from you if you’re right out of the gate asking them to pay you $99 a month, right? If they don’t know who you are, people that never heard of your product before, it’s a brand new business. So, if affiliates are going to drive traffic to a recurring offer on the front-end, the conversions are going to be really low. The earnings per click are going to be super low and affiliates aren’t going to make money off of it. And so, the affiliates are going to stop promoting it after they’ve maybe sent one email to their list.
Mark Thompson:
So, in order to get your earnings per click up and conversions up, you offer them a onetime offer on the front-end so that affiliate can get paid, right? Then on the back end have some sort of recurring. And when I say on the back end, it can be an immediate upsell right after they purchase or it could be down the road in your autoresponder sequence, right? So, if you’re selling LifterLMS, you could offer some sort of a training course on the front-end of how to build membership sites and all that kind of fun stuff. Then your back end offer is LifterLMS and they pay recurring on it. And so, the most successful product launches I’ve seen are the ones that have a front-end onetime offer or onetime price and then one, two or three upsells on the back end with at least one of those being recurring.
Chris Badgett:
Wow, that’s super golden. I’ve often seen people approach affiliate out of order. And you said something, you went over it pretty quickly, but I just want to highlight it, that affiliates, it’s not like a starting strategy. If your offer is not converting itself, if you can’t get your offer to convert, or it’s low, or you have a really low conversion rate, that’s not the time to start getting affiliates on board. Because, you’ve got to fix that. If you bring an affiliate in and do all the work, build the relationship, all that stuff, set them up, but your offer doesn’t convert, that relationship’s not going to go anywhere. So, sometimes I see people trying to do affiliate too early. You got to spend some time on the conversions there.
Mark Thompson:
Yeah, absolutely. And so, the key, if you can convert cold traffic, if you’re running cold Facebook traffic or any type of paid cold traffic, if you can get that to convert, well then you can go to your affiliates and say, “Hey, this is what it’s converting at with cold traffic. Now imagine if you promote it with a warm list of your subscribers and customers that’s relevant to this product. It’s going to convert at three times higher.”
Chris Badgett:
That’s sweet. What about affiliates and recurring revenue? I know some software companies, I’m thinking of, I think, AWeber back in the day, and there’s others that the affiliates get recurring commissions. Do you recommend recurring commissions? Or, you were kind of talking about if you have a big product on the front-end and the affiliate takes in a nice 20, 30, 50% chunk, but then the recurring revenue just stays with the business owner and it’s not part of it. What do you recommend? Or, it depends or what?
Mark Thompson:
It depends. I always like to give at least some recurring, even if it’s low, just because sometimes it can actually backfire on you if all these affiliates are driving new customers to you and they make that initial sale, which is great, they’re happy about that, but then they’re not making anything on the recurring. It can kind of leave a sour taste in their mouth. So, even if you can give them something. So, I’ve seen a lot of people say, “I’ll give you 50% commissions on the initial sale and then 25 or 30% on the rebills as long as they’re a customer.” And that really does help to your advantage. Hey, if you’re paying out rebills or rebill commissions, that means you’re making money long-term, right? They’re paying you month after month.
Mark Thompson:
So, it can be an added incentive for that affiliate if they’re like, “Hey, man, I’m making five grand a month off of recurring commissions month after month. I should probably continue to promote them.” Right? Whereas, if you just did a product launch, it was for seven days, you only paid them on the initial sale and then that was it, there’s really not an incentive for them to want to promote you evergreen, long-term.
Chris Badgett:
That’s awesome. I mean, you’re an advanced marketer and sales professional. Who are some of your influences? If somebody wants to learn more about product launches and just marketing and affiliate marketing, who are some people or resources that you recommend are good to learn from? I mean, Jeff Walker was the original Product Launch guy, right?
Mark Thompson:
Yeah, he was. I mean, a lot of what I learned was from Jeff. I mean, he kind of invented the whole Product Launch Formula. I think the Product Launch Formula, there’s pros and cons to it and you should use it in certain scenarios. If you’re just trying to get a business started or you have a whole bunch of new features and you want to kind of relaunch it and build an event out of it, that works really well. But put your own spin on it, right? There’s lots of different variations that I’ve done over the years to kind of put my own spin on it.
Mark Thompson:
And so, yeah, Jeff’s a great guy. Jeff Walker’s a good one to follow. Russell Brunson from ClickFunnels. God, I mean, there’s so many. All the CEOs and founders of mainstream SaaS companies like Intercom, they have tons of really good content. HubSpot has a ton of really good content. It just really depends on what industry you’re in, right? I don’t know. God, who do you like? Who do you follow? There’s so many. I keep on drawing a blank here.
Chris Badgett:
Well, we’re both fans of Dan Martell.
Mark Thompson:
Yep. Dan from Saas Academy.
Chris Badgett:
Yeah. I mean, there’s a lot. I’m also really in this space and I’m like, “Well, there’s like so many. How do I [crosstalk 00:28:02]?” But I think one of the important things you mentioned is if you’re a course creator, a membership site creator, sort of the early adopters of all this are software companies. So, watch how software companies do marketing and how they do recurring revenue models and stuff like that. Because, you can often learn from another industry.
Mark Thompson:
Yep.
Chris Badgett:
This is super cool. What is the best way to get started with PayKickstart? How do people, when they first come into it, what is the fastest path to kind of getting going? What do people do if they want to try it out?
Mark Thompson:
So, we have a 14 day free trial. So, you can just go to paykickstart.com and then click on the pricing page. We have three different plans. We’re actually going to be redoing our pricing in the near future, so depending on when you see this, the price may increase a little bit. But anyways, there’s a free trial for all of our plans. You can go in and sign up for a 14 day free trial. As soon as you get into the application there’s an onboarding modal that will walk you through step-by-step how to get your first product live and ready to start selling, just to kind of get you acclimated to the platform.
Mark Thompson:
Then there’s a ton of resources. We have some quick start guides that you can print out and just follow the quick start guides, if you don’t want to follow the kind of in-app onboarding. Then we also have 24/7 live chat. You can just click the little chat bubble in the bottom right hand corner and we have people there to answer your questions 24/7. We have a knowledge base, so that’s probably the best place to start if you have specific questions because, we keep adding to this knowledge base and there’s tons of articles just walking you through step-by-step how to do whatever it is that you’re looking to do inside the platform. So, there’s lots of resources to help make sure you’re successful and you understand what to do.
Chris Badgett:
And what’s in your on-demand webinars? I see that on your site. What are those?
Mark Thompson:
Yeah. So, we run webinars usually about once a month and just on different topics. So, it’s really just educational webinars, just teaching you ways to build your affiliate program or how to maximize conversions, how to minimize churn. I think there’s a webinar about how to handle disputes and chargebacks. So, just any kind of pains and challenges that you’ve had along the way or like, “Oh, that’s a really good idea. Let’s create a webinar out of it,” and you can access it there. So, feel free to go around. We have a blog and we have white papers. We have webinars. So, there’s lots of free content that you can get, even if you’re just kind of looking around for free content and you don’t necessarily want to be a PayKickstart customer, that’s fine. I think you’ll enjoy a lot of the content that we have on the website.
Chris Badgett:
Awesome. Well, go check that out at paykickstart.com. Mark, thank you so much for coming on the show and I really appreciate you adding LifterLMS integration. It means a lot and I’d encourage you, the listener, to go check out paykickstart.com.
Mark Thompson:
Thanks for having me, Chris. Appreciate it.
Chris Badgett:
And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMScast. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I hope you enjoyed the show. This show was brought to you by LifterLMS, the number one tool for creating, selling, and protecting engaging online courses to help you get more revenue, freedom, and impact in your life. Head on over to lifterlms.com and get the best gear for your course creator journey. Let’s build the most engaging, results getting courses on the internet.
