How Angela Palmer chose MemberVault over other platforms to grow her business

Full Episode Transcript

Hi, everybody. My name is Angela Palmer. I am an aesthetician and a holistic skincare educator and I teach busy women how to make their own simple natural DIY skincare products. Today, I want to share with you why I chose MemberVault to house my digital products over some of the other platforms out there. And I have tried several and MemberVault definitely is my favorite.

So this started last year when I got into the whole digital products and online courses. I have been teaching live classes and workshops for the last 20 years teaching women how to make soap and skin care products. And then last year COVID hit, and obviously, I couldn't teach any of my live workshops. All of my life classes were just shut down for that for that year. And it had been in the back of my mind for the last several years that maybe I wanted to get some of my courses online and COVID gave me I guess a good excuse to go ahead and jump in and do that because I had the time and I wasn't able to to go anywhere and teach live anymore.

So I thought this was probably the right time to do it. So I started with Teachable and the only reason I chose Teachable was because it was the only online um course platform that I had heard of at the time. So that was, that was the only reason why I chose Teachable. So I started um you know, uploading all of my course information and in general, I really liked Teachable but the biggest issue I had with them, and the one that finally prompted me to look elsewhere was that it took forever for any of my videos to be uploaded onto their platform. I mean, literally hours upon hours upon hours.

I had my freebie course and I think it was, I had like just four or five videos that needed to be uploaded for that. And it took like eight hours to upload those four videos. And then when I went to put my paid soap-making course up on Teachable, it took me two days of doing nothing but uploading videos. It was so frustratingly slow to get anything uploaded onto them. Even with high-speed internet. It didn't make any sense. However, after two days, I still did not have all of my videos uploaded. And I said this is just ridiculous. It's not sustainable. I have to look somewhere else.

So I started looking around for what other options were out there and I found Thinkific and Thinkific has really beautiful landing pages that, could be built out pretty templates. So I thought, oh, this is a good one, signed up for Thinkific and I transferred all of my courses and I had some ebooks from Teachable over to Thinkific, and I loved the landing pages and I love the home page because it was really pretty. But once my students actually got into the classroom portal, I found that that was not very attractive. I didn't like the way it was set up. I didn't like the way it was laid out. I didn't think it was giving my students a really good user experience. And really the only thing I could customize there was the color, everything else was just kind of the way it was. So that was a little bit frustrating for me.

And then with Thinkific because it's very much just about courses. So, on the product page, there is a title that says courses and it can't be changed. And I also had some ebooks that I have up on my online classroom. So that was a little bit confusing for my students because they get to the, the product page and it just says courses and there's a couple of courses there, but there's also some ebooks there too so that they were a little bit confused and I wasn't super happy with that. But my biggest issue that I had with Thinkific was that everything that I wanted to do with my course platform.

I wanted coupons, I wanted hidden courses and I wanted to be able to integrate my email service provider with my course platform. And all of these things that I wanted to do were on not just their paid plan, but like three tiers up. So it was like a very expensive tier um that I would have to get into and pay monthly to really access all the features that I wanted to. And that was kind of a tough pill for me to swallow, you know, coming off of that COVID year and where I hadn't been able to teach any of my live classes and just starting to get into the digital courses, that money really wasn't coming in. So that was a big chunk of change to pay out every month. So that was, that was probably my biggest complaint that I had with Thinkific.

Then about this time, one of my business buddies, Michelle at Happy Pin Design. I had signed up for a free course that she had on her site. And once I got in there and I started going through her modules and her lessons, I really liked the way it was laid out. She had it really set up super cute and it was pretty when you got in there and it was super easy, to go through all of her lessons. She told me that she was using MemberVault. I had never heard of MemberVault before and she said she really liked it. So I signed up just for a free account with MemberVault because I wanted, to see what it was all about.

Once I got into MemberVault, I was super excited that there were so many options for customizing my site and customizing my courses so that when my students got in there, everything flowed exactly the way I wanted it to. It wasn't just about colors, but it was everything that I wanted to be able to do. And I wanted my students to go through with my courses. I was able to do that really easily so that was exciting for me. I could put my ebooks up there and I had a separate category for ebooks. So my ebooks were not shoved under this course category and looked kind of strange there. So that was nice and everything that I wanted to do with my coupons and the the hidden courses and bonus modules and bundling of my products, integrating with my email tags and, and getting my automatic email sequences going literally everything that I wanted to do I could do with MemberVault right off the bat. So that was super exciting for me, so I did migrate all of my stuff then over from Thinkific, I put it up onto MemberVault, and it actually took me probably about two weeks to really go through and learn everything that there was to learn about MemberVault and getting everything set up the way that I wanted it to.

So some of the other course platform forms, I think right off the bat, were a lot easier to learn. The learning curve wasn't as steep as it was with MemberVault just because you have so many options for customizing. So it did take me a lot longer to get everything set up initially and there was a lot more to learn there, but the trade-off was once I got everything set, it was exactly the way I envisioned. So I was super, super happy with it. And now that it's set up, it's actually much quicker than some of the other platforms to get my products um set up there. So, just a few days ago, I got my freebie course for my lead magnet set up and it took me about 30 minutes to get everything done. So it was super, super fast and I was, I was really happy with that.

Another real big benefit for me with choosing Member Vault is the Facebook group. I have learned so much from just browsing everybody's posts there on the Facebook group. And I was like, oh wow, I didn't know that that you could do this with MemberVault and I didn't know you could do that just by reading everybody else's post. So for somebody who is not super techy like I am, that was a big benefit moving to MemberVault because it was super, super helpful. And if I had a question, I could just get on the Facebook group, search it and somebody invariably has asked that question before. So I got a lot of my questions answered just by doing that. So it was super, super fast, really, really helpful. So that is kind of why I have moved all of my digital products over to MemberVault. And I know that I am definitely here to stay. I am not moving again because MemberVault gives me all the functionality that I need and it's just very affordable. It was exactly what I was looking for so I was super excited to be here and I'm definitely, at Member Vault to stay.

Thanks for listening. If you want to learn more about how to make your own handmade soap and skincare products, you can find me at AngelaPalmer.com or if you want to check out my brand new online schoolhouse which is hosted by MemberVault. It's at AngelaPalmer.vip.membervault. Thanks.