88_The 5 Tech Tools I recommend for Ambitious Introverts
Emma_Louise: [00:00:00] Hello, ambitious introverts and welcome to this solo episode of the podcast. Now, based on the market research data that I got a couple of months ago from you guys, one of the things that came up over and over again is that you would love to see a little bit more. more. behind the scenes of my business and how I grow my business.
So in this episode, I am going to be covering five of the tools that we utilize here at the ambitious introvert and the ones that we use the most, like on a day-to-day basis that are integral to the running of the business. And before I get started, I'm going to link them all in the show notes. And just to let you know, some of those links may be affiliate links, which means that I may receive a commission, even though it doesn't cost you any more to purchase, or in some cases you may even get a discount for using that link.
But I only recommend things that are. Uh, door, as you know. So anything that I mentioned in [00:01:00] here is definitely worth looking at, I have chopped and changed with software a few times, and this is where we are at now for good reason, which I will cover also many of these offer annual subscriptions, which often save about 20%, but the prices that I'm going to quote off for paying monthly.
So the price that I can tell you is probably the highest you would pay. , and I'm also going to tell you the price in us dollars because they all charge in us dollars. Um, so the first one I'm going to discuss is Thrivecart Thrivecart is something I'd had my eye on for about year before. For about a year, I was considering Kajabi.
Now the issue here in the UK and possibly elsewhere, I'm not sure with Kajabi is that the Kajabi checkout does not calculate the local sales tax. So if you are tax registered VAT registered business, it will not calculate it for you. And that is something. If you are selling a lot of digital [00:02:00] products, something that you would have to get bookkeeper accountants do, and just generally a bit of a nightmare.
However thrive cart does calculate. So what many people do is they use Kajabi for the functionality of like delivering courses and using it as their email, et cetera, but then they still use the Thrivecart checkout for people to purchase rather than using the Kajabi checkout. So that's where it first came into my sphere of awareness.
And then I decided that I did not need Kajabi, um, because as much as it looks very nice, it was quite an investment. So I was going backwards and forwards with some other course hosting platforms. And then as if by magic, Thrivecart produced its own course platform called learn. Now the great thing about this is it's.
So if you purchase thrive cart, which is a one-off lifetime investment, I'll talk about in a moment [00:03:00] you get, learn for free now that this significant, because course hosting and hosting digital products, et cetera, memberships, it can add up to like many, many hundreds of dollars a month, depending on how many members you have.
So the fact that learn is free is amazing. I currently have. Couple of digital products on there. I've got the waitlist membership on there. My group program also runs on there. So there are two options there's learn and learn. Plus I actually upgraded to learn plus which again is a one-off payment. I don't remember off the top of my head, why, but there must've been some functionality within that, that I wanted.
Also, I knew that I was going to host everything in the business on here. So it was a bit of a no-brainer, but basically. Is the most delightful platform because everything is drag and drop. It's completely customizable. And it's just so, so, so [00:04:00] easy to use to get those products up and running. So I would really recommend thrive car itself for the checkout, which is amazing, and then learn all that.
And plus for the course hosting, the only downside and it's a minor one is that you can't have. Content on there. And so you can't host your video or your audio or your PDFs on that. So something like Kajabi or podium they host for you with Thrivecart learn you don't. So you need separate service to host them.
So for videos you could use Vimeo is very popular. Um, I use loom, so I record my videos in loom and then embed them in the, um, for PDFs. You could use something like Amazon web services. Or I'm just using Google docs, which I already have. So it's so it's free. So it's not a big deal, but it's just something to remember that you are linking that content in there rather than it being hosted on there
so the price and for thrive caught is a [00:05:00] one-off investment of $495. And that is lifetime access. So they have moved away from the subscription model of paying every month. And it's, yes, it's a higher investment off the bat. Um, but then you have it. forever, Basically, and the learn platform, as I said, it's free, which is really amazing because it has some great functionality.
And especially if you don't have a ton of products or you're new to business, we'll give you everything that you need. The upgrade to learn plus is $195. So again, that one off payment, but to cover the functionality that you get long-term I think is really, really reasonable. Okay. The next. Software that I can not live without is active campaign.
So when I started my business, I tried MailChimp and I hated it and I tried mailer light and I couldn't get on with it. And then I landed upon flow desk, which I adored. I used flow desk for. Seven or eight [00:06:00] months. Um, so if you have been subscribed to me from early days, you may remember this beautiful flow desk emails.
It was such a gorgeous interface. They are, the design is stunning. Everything about it was just amazing, but flow desk is not built for scaling. So if you are just going to be sending out a weekly newsletter, Absolutely fine. flowdesk is, is great. But if you are looking to scale your business in a way with multiple digital products, if you want to be able to segment your list and tag and understand your buyer's behavior and where people have opted in through, and really customize and personalize their experience, then flow desk does not have enough backend functionality.
And unfortunately that's where, that's where we were. So. I moved to active campaign. It was really between, um, convert kit and active campaign. And, you know, my fear at the time was like, I really like active campaigns. It's like, fine, let's go with that. So I would say the [00:07:00] emails are not as beautiful as flow desk.
However. At the campaign itself is cheaper and it is very customizable. Um, so you can, you know, add graphics, you can embed gifts, all of that kind of stuff. Um, but it has the, the really great backend functionality to tag and segment your subscribers into lists. So for instance, When people come onto my list, I know what they downloaded.
Did they come through this, you know, free download or did they come through the blog or do they come through the podcast and where it's really useful? It's something like my wait list. When people sign up to the wait list within the backend of active campaign, they are in a separate yet. They're on the main list.
They get the newsletter and everything, but they're on a wait list list. So when I want to put out content just to the wait list, I simply select that. And off it goes directly to the right people which is amazing. So active campaign. starts at $15 per month, which I think is very reasonable. I currently pay $30 per month and it is [00:08:00] tiered based on how many subscribers you have on your list.
Um, but I think that $30 a month is, goes up to about two and a half thousand subscribers. So, so it's quite significant. And I think $15 a month is up to about a thousand. So, um, very reasonable for what you get. Um, I can't talk about the. Usability and learning curve of it because this was outsourced. The second I got it, I knew that it was not efficient for me to learn how to do this.
Um, so I, myself don't get stuck in, um, but it worked very well for us as a tool, uh, case number three is. This is a tricky one because I'm going to ma I don't love . Dubsado do not love Dubsado, which everyone seems to adore it. And I don't, and I have spent a lot of time researching because I'm a, one-three, it's been a lot of time research and better options.
And there aren't any in the UK. HoneyBook is a really great option. I [00:09:00] think if you're in the U S or Canada, um, Currency wise, it's not an option for us here in the UK, so I don't love it. I don't think that Dubsado is perfect, but do I think there's a better option out there for an all in one CRM platform for me as a coach?
No. No, I don't. And when I got it set up, I don't think it was set up that well, it was, you know, two and a half years ago, I paid someone to set up for me. I don't think it was done that well, I then messed with it myself because I changed some things in my packages or whatever. So there is a huge potential for if it's built amazingly from day one, that it works
really really well. And I have to admit I've been on the receiving end of workflows from other people that I have worked with and they look amazing and I can see how professional it is. And it, the automations definitely save so much time. So I'm [00:10:00] not saying it's bad. I'm just saying I don't love it.
Maybe because it's not my zone of genius maybe because we didn't set it up well, but it's an all round CRM with scheduling invoices. Lead capture, sending out forms, all of that good stuff, I think is the best thing available right now on the market for me in my business. So starts at $20 per month. The.
Package that I use is $40 per month. Just for some extra functionality, I think more, more projects. Um, and if you do click the link in the show notes, you save 20%. And I do believe that if you signed up for a year, you save 20% on that year. So it was quite significant or maybe 20% off your first month.
If you, if you go monthly and number four is free, number four is possibly the software that I use. Most of my business hand it's free and it is slack. I adore slack. I can not think for more [00:11:00] versatile software, we use it for team channels. I use it for private channels with one-on-one clients. I use it for the group channel for the group program.
You can share documents, you can share files links integrates with Google drive integrates with loom, um, on certain plans you can even get voice memos and send video. You can do huddle meetings, all kinds of things. But I've got the free plan and it is perfectly adequate for what I need it to do. Um, I, yeah, I adore slack.
I think that it's a beautiful user interface to look at it. It's just clean. It's minimal. It's easy. It makes sense. And I can't imagine not having it in the business. I can't imagine having to replace all of those ways of communications. That's all in one kind of centralized place in, in various modalities, especially as an introvert I like to have everything, you know, all together.
Keep it simple in one place. So highly, [00:12:00] highly, highly recommend slack for free. And lastly, Well, I think is the most underrated software. No one ever talks about it. And I love this product it's called convert box, completely separate to convert kit that I mentioned earlier. Convert box is in essence. Lead capture software.
So it's pop-ups and embedded forms and all of that good stuff that you have on your website to collect people's email addresses. I've had convert box for Ooh, about 18 months now. And I, I can't believe, I don't see it more often. I can't believe that more people don't use it for various reasons. The first being that it's so easy to use.
I'm not good with texts. If I'm saying it's easy to use, it really is. It's drag and drop. It's really customizable. It's just so easy. So [00:13:00] simple. It integrates with everything that I need it. Like seamlessly integrates with show it when my website is hosted integrates with active campaign, it oh, it's just so, so easy to use.
As I said, completely customizable design. You can make some absolutely beautiful pop-ups. On here, not just your standard, like box with, you know, name here, email here, you can do all kinds of things. You can get really creative. Not that I have, but you can, I've seen examples of it. And if you are on my mailing list, then you will have seen them.
You will have signed up via a convert box, either pop up or embedded form within the blog. So. Really customizable with, with graphics, with fonts, with the layout, with colors, with everything you can think of also really customizable timings for pop-ups. So, [00:14:00] so many options. I mean, I'm not, I don't have it up on the screen, but off the top of my head, you can have a pop-up straight away or you can set how many seconds delay.
Would you like the pop-up when someone navigates to the second page of the website, or would you like the pop-up to pop up when they leave and would you like on the left or the right or the top of the bottom all of these things. Um, so really great. Also really great because. Really easy to split test your campaigns.
So maybe you can set an a and a B, so you can have it, you know, for half the people that visit your site pops up on the left and for half it pops up on the right, and then you can see which one gets most opt-ins, which one converts best. So it's really great with the stats and the data to really enable you to optimize your marketing efforts, which of course we will.
You can add video to it. You can add video to your pop-ups, which is just the most amazing thing. Or you can have like a thank you video. So I used to do this when people opted in for my one-on-one private coaching brochure, once they've [00:15:00] opted in it, directed them to a video saying thank you so much and explaining what was going to happen next to them.
You can also include questions. You can add questions in a pop-up. So for example, I've never, I haven't used this, but how would it relate to my business? So someone could land on my website and the pop-up come up and it could be like, Hey, ambitious, introvert, welcome what stage of business you are. And I'll direct.
You. You know, wherever to help you best. And it could say it's someone like brand new to business. Are they established or are they looking to scale? And then when they click, it can take them to the best page of the website. That's got, you know, the information that products and services that's best suited to that person.
So it is super, super intentional and detailed, which I love. I am. Using convert box to anywhere near its capacity. I know I'm not because it's not my zone of genius, but that is scheduled in for later in the year. I've got some people that are going to optimize it for me. And [00:16:00] I am very, very excited to see what it's capable of because I just think it is a phenomenal tool.
And so, so underrated. Can you tell I'm excited. So convert box is like Thrivecart, it's a one-time payment as $495. So I'm not going to pretend this is cheap because that is a, a significant investment. But as they say, I've had it for 18 months. So. I'm not even going to do the maths because I'm bad at maths, but whatever that equates to each month, I know if you are using other things like lead pages or other type of pop-up software, and you're paying monthly, you're going to be paying in the region of say 20 to $50 a month, if not more so over time that is going to add up.
So it feels hefty with the one-time payment, but for me as someone that is prioritise in SEO, that prioritises the blog. You know, the, the website is where I want to drive traffic to. It [00:17:00] makes complete sense for me to make sure that when people aren't landing on the website, I'm doing, making it work as hard as it can and give myself the best chance of getting those people's details so that they can come into the newsletter and come into the world of the ambitious Introvert
it does have a 30 day money back guarantee. So if you're thinking oh, $500, um, it does have a 30 day money back guarantee. So you can always have it and play around and have a look. Um, that was there when I purchased, which I think was one of the things I was like, okay, I'll just have a look and see, but I instantly fell in love with it and I've never looked back
so that is super speedy Roundup of five main tools that we are using to grow the business every day. So that is Thrivecart checkout and the associated learn, plus course hosting platform, active campaign for emails Dubsado as the all-in-one CRM, [00:18:00] not perfect, but does the job better than anything else out there?
Slack for communication? So team comes client comms, hosting groups, et cetera, and then convert box for those pop-ups embedded forms, embedded in the blog, et cetera, to make sure that my website is working as hard as it possibly can for the business so I hope that was useful. I would love to know. Is there anything else you would like to hear from behind the scenes of the business?
Is there anything else you would like to hear about different tools that I use or different systems? If so, head on over to Instagram at ambitious introvert, drop me a message. I'll make a note of it for next time. I'm recording, but for now, definitely check out these platforms. See if they might be a good fit for you.
And any questions, feel free to reach out