Category: Opinions

Perhaps We Should All STOP Being Paranoid About Competition

I’m back here in India after a long break. Lot of things have changed.

Internet is the cheapest and fastest in the world. Seriously.

For 6.88 USD you get 200GB of 4G data. And no, 4G isn’t limited to just a few cities, its available even in small towns and villages (at least here in the South). And while my bus keeps moving – like my delightful experience in Peru.

Anyways as a side-effect, everything has changed. People stream videos ALL THE TIME.
Especially in Bangalore traffic, the ~~taxi~~ Uber/Ola drivers do.

And… as my old friend put it, there is an app for EVERYTHING.

Funny thing is a lot of these apps are marketplaces or aggregators. Health centres, football courts, hair dressers, physiotherapists, maids, groceries, restaurants, restaurants that only provide take-away, group fitness classes.

Holy f***ing s*** what happened to the India I left.

Now if you provide a platform for all restaurants – you can provide more value (and make more money) than any single restaurant might. Same goes for Taxis, Hairdressers, Digital Marketing Agencies and all types of businesses.

How I see these marketplace aggregators

I see them as natures way of saying if you don’t join hands together, someone outside will come make you do it.

They will not only make you do it, but also dictate how you all do your business very soon.

We see them everyday – big name web companies and consultants who directly compete with each other promoting each other. Inviting each other on their podcasts and writing guest post for each other.

Are they insane? Wouldn’t their audience go to their competitor?

What if the opposite happens, what if the competitor’s audience comes to them?

I understand its hard to understand how valuable we are, when we are small and barely scraping revenue to pay our bills.

But perhaps we all not realising this is what is causing that state. We all bring our uniqueness to our table. No matter what competition we face, there will be customers who will flock to us for who we are (as long as we market ourselves authentically that is). Don’t expect to do the same copying crap we do right now and still expect customers.

I am making it a personal goal to partner up with someone this week and promote each other. How about you?

P.S. I am going to be posting everyday from now without worrying about anything – readers, quality of post, word count, SEO. Thanks to the inspiration by Seth Godin on his interview with MarieForleo recently. Comment below if you want to join blogging everyday.

3rd October 2018
Making AccessAlly Work With Woocommerce and Drip
I write this so that it can help another person save hours of time, money and sleep before considering AccessAlly with WooCommerce and Drip combo for their membership site. I do this as a last resort after spending months of development time plus precious money buying all the plugins needed for this project and getting no support from these platforms.

[Update 1: AccessAlly’s founder Nathalie Lussier replied positively to my share of this article on Membership Mastermind facebook group. I am thankful to TheMembershipGuys for helping me use their group to voice my concerns. I have included further updates below.]

For a membership site development project recently, my team was moving a “custom-made non WordPress membership site” to “WordPress membership site using AccessAlly”

The client was already using WorldPay for their existing membership site subscriptions – one of the worst outdated payment processors in the world in my opinion.

We had built a lead-generation site for the same client that integrated with Drip and were very happy with the Drip platform. So we wanted a membership platform that would work with Drip as well.

So finally we wanted a membership software platform that can work with Drip and work with WorldPay’s FuturePay platform. ~~There is literally no membership plugin software that supports WorldPay’s FuturePay out of the box.~~

[Update 2: Apparently aMember supports WorldPay out of the box according to a comment I received from the facebook group post. I verified on their website that they do. But we would have not chosen aMember because we really needed a tag based system like AccessAlly or Memberium as we wanted some custom features designed using tag automations]

And we found that WooCommerce had a plugin to accept payments from WorldPay’s FuturePay subscription system.

While we were considering various options for the membership website, the marketing head of the client’s company had heard of AccessAlly and was impressed. She wanted us to consider using it, as it seemed like the best option out there for their needs.

I digged around their documentation and they had various articles on how it works with WooCommerce. They also assured that we can get AccessAlly to work with WooCommerce and Drip combo using another extension from WooCommerce.

Now we had the following plugins
1. AccessAlly (984$ a year)
2. WooCommerce (Free)
3. Extension – WooCommerce Subscriptions (199$ a year)
4. WooCommerce For Drip Extension (79$ a year)
5. WorldPay/FuturePay payment gateway for WooCommerce extension (79$ a year)
Smooth Start In the Beginning

At first things were reasonably smooth. AccessAlly’s setup was straight forward, and everything in AccessAlly was controlled through tags on Drip.

In the beginning of the purchase of their plugin, we had direct content with Robin, AccessAlly’s lead developer. She would answer our questions diligently and we felt great receiving support and strategic advice.

(You can click on images below to see full screenshots)

First reply from Robin, lead developer of AccessAlly

We start building the new membership site. Our plan was to finish the content, membership levels, individual products and then finally work on payment systems. The last step was to import their subscribers from their existing custom made membership site built on Django.

When we started to work on payments things started going bad.

How AccessAlly’s Support Didn’t Care After Onboarding Us

Now apparently “WooCommerce For Drip” plugin does not create a user in the Drip backend, unless they exclusively check a box on the final payment page which adds them to a drip campaign as well.

So if a user makes a WooCommerce Subscription purchase for a membership and accidentally forgets to check a box (which cannot be made mandatory), then even after purchase they simply cannot login to AccessAlly. Simply because everything in AccessAlly is controlled through Drip and its tags. There was no record of the purchase on Drip, not even their email was added.

Disappointed after spending more than a month to build everything, we reached out to AccessAlly’s support. Only now, someone else answered when we reached out to Robin. To us it seemed it AccessAlly’s onboarding was great, and then they simply automated our support requests to some other developer (Erika) who said I needed to contact WooCommerce and they would help us out.

1st Email reply from Erika – AccessAlly Support Developer

WooCommerce Let Down and AccessAlly’s Unprofessional Support

I had to reach out to WooCommerce again, and the reply was a simple one line – “Users will not be added to Drip unless they check the box”. I explained them how we don’t need them added to any campaign, but they simply repeated the same answer.

Disappointed I went back to AccessAlly’s support. And this is what I received.

Erika’s second reply

Needless to say I felt abandoned. I persistently followed up. Simply because now they were simply playing blame games now.

Erika’s 3rd reply

My final email to Erika

What really bothered me is this – Erika’s reply says, “we can only make promises on what AccessAlly can do”. How is an article on their own website which clearly says it works with WooCommerce and Drip “not a promise”?

This was simply, for a lack of better word – STUPID and seems like their AVOIDANCE FROM TAKING RESPONSIBILITY.

Gets Even Worse

After all the let down, we had to hire a WordPress plugin developer to create a custom plugin patch to fill the gap of adding users to Drip after a purchase. This was never part of the budget and we had to take hit on the expenses after all the headache.

After a week or two passes by, we are almost near the completion of all contents and payments. We finally test the cancellation flow of WooCommerce Subscriptions.

Then we realized, there is no mention of this anywhere. If a customer cancels their subscription, while they stop paying, they will still be able to access everything on AccessAlly.

This is because none of the plugins AccessAlly’s article recommended even deal with cancellation flow. So no tags on Drip are removed, and hence AccessAlly lets users access membership content even after they stop paying.

THEN IT HIT ME, none of their knowledge base recommendations were tested by AccessAlly’s team, EVER or considered for real world usage. Because how can something as trivial as cancellation be not even thought of?

It was simply a way to sell. Because that seems like the only focus at least from where I stand.

How Do We Move Forward?

At the time of writing this, the only way to move forward seems to be hiring another developer again for the cancellation flow. Its going to cost a lot for custom development and we had never quoted this to the client because all these companies promise us out of the box behaviour.

It sucks that no one wants to take responsibility for the functionality and are simply keen to sell.

For instance, even after all of this, AccessAlly has not ~~changed a word on their KB Article~~. (Update: Feb 6, 2021 – I noticed some traffic to this article. I went back to their KB article and happy that they are finally transparent about the limitations. I do feel good about pushing them to do that *wink*) ~~This means more customers will be affected by their false article.~~ Also I left an objective review on the specified WooCommerce Extension about its shortcomings and it was never approved by WooCommerce as they control the reviews on site.

[Update 3: Nathalie Lussier, AccessAlly’s founder promised to update their KB article about the reality of using it with WooCommerce and Drip, it was comforting to feel heard and getting assurance from their founder that they care]

Reply on Facebook group by Nathalie Lussier

Concluding thoughts: While I am a user/developer of WordPress and its ecosystem, I am kinda starting to see why there are platforms like Shopify, Kajabi, Teachable, Squarespace etc which some people prefer to avoid a lot of headache with “plugins hell”. At least with these platform, while they do make you dependent on them, they take responsibility.
16th July 2018
Why Thrive Themes Vs Genesis Isn’t Good Comparison?
I see loads of people online trying to compare Thrive Themes Vs Genesis. And I see affiliate marketers writing long-form reviews without any real experience just to sell for affiliate commission and SEO points. So I hope this article will help someone make the choice between what to buy for their website.

I want to clear out all the differences in this article and explain why it isn’t right to compare them both in the first place.

First of all, the marketing world and the average blogger is interested in Genesis because of StudioPress’ child themes and not for the genesis framework.

StudioPress makes beautiful, SEO optimised, fast and conversion focused themes built on the Genesis Framework. Many notable online marketing gurus, media companies, agencies and small businesses use genesis child themes for their website.

Thrive themes as a company is dedicated to building themes and powerful plugins that are marketed around the term “conversion” as well. They are gaining popularity with their plugins which have high cost-to-quality ratio and extremely good marketing.

So when people who are about to enter the world of online marketing research, they hear both these tools being recommended.

This is the root of the confusion.

But I say it isn’t right to compare them both in the first place.

If they both do the same thing, why can’t we compare it?

Here’s why..

They are different

“Genesis is a framework”

It took me many months to understand this statement. In spite of having a strong technical background myself, I struggled. Having been a developer and technical architect, I understand terms like libraries, frameworks, engines etc used frequently in the technical nerd world.

Yet, this was a statement that kept me from even trying Genesis based themes sooner (which I regret a teeny tiny bit)

Genesis is like an engine to a car. Car is the theme, and engine is the framework. But not exactly. Due to the nature of software and code, we can’t really find a perfect real world analogy for explaining what a framework is. Same reason why we cannot copy-paste anything physical in less than a second.

StudioPress is the company which owns the Genesis framework. They also sell a lot of well-polished child themes created using the Genesis Framework.

If its all too confusing and you are just beginning, you DON’T need to understand what a framework or a child theme is. You can simply go to StudioPress website and pick a theme, buy it and start using it with basic knowledge of how to use WordPress.

So, how about Thrive Themes’ themes Vs StudioPress themes?

In that case StudioPress wins in my opinion for the following reasons.
1. Their themes are much higher quality – technically, design-wise and conversion focused.
2. Their themes are made using Genesis framework, which is technically sound and great for extension and customisation.
3. Both the themes are kinda equal in terms of out-of-the-box customisability.
4. Many of their themes look outdated (not all) and you risk looking outdated if you use them.
5. Thrive themes aren’t great for branding. They are content and conversion focused only.
6. Thrive themes aren’t great for aesthetics, but still good enough and will have good conversions to create a profitable blog, sell e-books etc.
7. StudioPress themes will do the same, with better aesthetics. (but are slightly expensive)
8. For instance until today, when you change fonts in Thrive Themes themes, it won’t reflect in a few places like menus and few other locations. While its not that ugly for some people, its not nice if you want to create a branded site with fonts that you want your brand to strictly stick to.
9. And ultimately Genesis based StudioPress themes have great support for WooCommerce (much more than Thrive Themes does)
What does Thrive themes themes offer out-of-the-box that StudioPress themes don’t?
1. Thrive themes has built-in Image Optimisations.
2. Thrive themes has built-in social media sharing features
For StudioPress you need a (free) plugin for these features.

Then why do I still own Thrive Themes Membership for 2+ years now?

Because Thrive themes membership provides me about 10 different plugins for different purposes and 10 WordPress themes now. I guarantee that they will be releasing more plugins given their history. I have been their customer for 2+ years now.

Their themes aren’t actually their strength. Their plugins are. Their Thrive Architect plugin is their super-hero page builder and the other plugin Thrive Leads is the side-kick.

I use them extensively along with plugins like Thrive Ultimatum, Thrive Apprentice and Thrive Comments frequently.

The homepage of this website and few other landing pages are built with Thrive Architect. As of writing this article the website runs on Thrive Themes’ Minus theme. But very soon it will be running on a Genesis child theme. I will continue to use Thrive Leads, Apprentice and Comments for a long time I predict.

Should you buy a Thrive Themes Membership or Individual licenses?

If you need just 1 or 2 of their plugins, just buy their individual licenses. If you need more than 2 of their plugins, get their membership as it works out to be the same price for a year. For that price, you get access to all their plugins and all their themes. You can use them on unlimited personal sites that you own.

So who can use Thrive Themes’ themes?

Anyone who is starting out to build an entire online marketing funnel, start content marketing, sell e-books and informational products. Or anyone who simply has an online business where content marketing, landing pages and lead magnets play the main role.

These starters should be focused on the content and their product. Not on branding, fonts and colours. They can simply install a Thrive themes’ theme, just use a custom text logo and focus on building content, products and growing their email list.

Their main challenges are at this stage are product validation because they haven’t even made a single sale yet. They need to focus on simply writing good content/copy, doing customer research, offering high quality lead magnets, building an email list and making a sale.

Of course, if you are starting a luxury shoe store online, I don’t recommend using thrive themes. Even though you are starting out, you need to focus on aesthetics and branding in that case. But not if your focus is selling e-courses, e-books and other informational products, Thrive themes’ themes will do perfectly fine.

Not that you cannot use StudioPress Themes for this, but you will need Thrive themes membership to build your funnel anyways and you get their themes along with that.

So you have no need to buy anything extra. But if you have the extra cash and prefer aesthetically better themes, you can buy StudioPress themes.

But remember, at your stage of the business, unless it hurts aesthetics are simply a distraction.

I know few ex-clients who simply keep changing theme after theme, tweaking colours and fonts forever without actually doing any work in terms of building good content, growing their list or creating good products.

What I Recommend for Established Online Businesses? – Mix Genesis with Thrive Themes.

For my clients who are non-starters and already established, their goals are to build their brand and focus on providing consistent brand experience on their website as well.

My current suggested stack is to use Genesis framework with one of their premium child themes, or make your own with Cobalt apps Dynamik website builder (it outputs technically sound, extremely fast code) and very easy to customise for your brand without a developer and spending thousands for a branded site. Then use the Thrive themes’ plugins on top to build your funnel, landing pages, lead magnets, scarcity tools a/b testing etc.

They both work well together without any problems. Moreover any custom coding or features you want built specially for your business in the future, its easily doable with Genesis as your theme framework.

Warning: Don’t use ThemeForest themes as a foundation for your online business

I would like to end this article concluding you should avoid buying themes from ThemeForest. This decision came out of experience of years. They are usually bloated, use loads of unwanted plugins, often run into plugin conflicts, and their updates often break each other’s dependency. It will create headaches for you in the long run especially if you have a content based online business. So stay away from them even though they might appear shiny and have a billion features shipped with them.

(Note: This post contains affiliate links. But I am not an “affiliate marketer”. I simply recommend tools, softwares I love, have used for a long time and trust. And I care about what I recommend. If you click on some of the links in this article and buy those products I get a commission. Plus often you may get a discount if you buy through them. You will NEVER be charged anything more than the usual price or extra if you click those links and buy through them)
30th May 2018
Why I’m Having an Affair with Divi, yet Can’t Break off My Thrive Themes Marriage

I make most of my living out of Thrive themes and their plugins.

Almost all of my clients use it.

But even after my 3rd renewal of my annual subscription with Thrive themes, I still will NOT call them one word – reliable. Time and time again, since their early versions, they have been consistently overselling their capabilities, and shipping products that are buggy.

Perhaps its because I use it to manage multiple clients’ online businesses at a time. And an average user would use it only on 1 website at a time. Maybe, I’m a minority.

Naturally, I always keep an eye open for another, more reliable tool that could potentially save a lot of my headaches from Thrive Themes.

Experience with Divi

I tried Divi builder once (before Thrive Architect came out), and definitely found my first experience delightful. It was perfect to build beautiful websites, without having to adjust things like padding, margins as their default settings were perfectly designed.

Looks like one of Divi’s core goal was aesthetics, and hence many of the design decisions has been already made for you, by adapting best design practices out of the box. Of course they allow you to change all of it. But I hardly did. I built a beautiful webpage pretty fast.

And more surprisingly I didn’t run into a single bug. You might laugh reading this, but for me, after working with Thrive Content Builder for so long, this was a luxurious experience.

But why haven’t I switched to Divi yet you ask?

Two reasons – Familiarity and Cost of Change. You see Thrive themes as a company is building a platform. They are a platform like Amazon, Google, Apple or Microsoft is. They don’t consider themselves a software or a tools company. Shane is someone I respect and learn from. He is very smart and right about this strategy.

Their platform design and strategy will seduce and attract every online marketing business out there. And make them marry their platform, not just have casual no-string-attached fun.

And when you break off a marriage, its going to cost you. In various multiple ways.

Their plugins are designed to be used with each other seamlessly.

Once you are in, you find yourself using all or most of their plugins – Thrive Comments, Thrive Architect, Thrive Ultimatum, Thrive Leads, Thrive Ovation, Apprentice, Quiz Builder, Headline Optimizer and Clever Widgets.

And even when your experience isn’t great, they still do work and you find your business depending on it. (again marriage analogy)

Now let’s say someone like me updates a client’s website to Thrive architect 2.0 and all hell breaks lose.

What do I do?

I write a blog post bitching about it, share my frustration with clients on project update calls, and then… go back to continue fixing the bug, finding workarounds and then do intensive yoga at the end of the day to get rid of all the stress caused during my work day.

Because, its not just a matter of finding a replacement for Thrive Architect. I can’t just swap Thrive Architect with Divi Page Builder. No.

There are 15 lead groups with multiple optins, 6 Thrive light boxes and few Thrive Lead short codes with content locking setup on my client’s website. Buttons on various Thrive Architect pages launch many of them.

Is Divi Builder going to be able to launch a Thrive Leads popup by a button press? Noooo…

The Thrive Comments plugin is already linked to Thrive Ovation. And my Thrive Architect page displays the Thrive Ovation testimonials with features supported only by Thrive Architect. Is Divi Page Builder going to display those? Noooo….

And what about Thrive Ultimatum and its integrations with Thrive Architect and Thrive Leads?

You get the point.

So switching to any of the alternatives will mean, finding a replacement for all the rest of their plugins.

Yes, they advertise that their plugins work independently blah, blah, blah. Devil is in the fine-print here.

And they have been unstoppable. Plugins like Thrive Apprentice and Thrive Comments are perfect examples of their company’s long term strategy.

Is it really that bad

Their tools have been improving. Given their recent, finally, some good looking templates for Thrive Architect, they seem to be getting good with design as a company. I just found ways to adjust by making rules like – “Never ever update a major version of their plugin, until 3-4 weeks after release and the bugs get sorted out”

And even after all this complaining, I haven’t found a company at their price point, with tools like theirs that covers most aspects of a web business and their amazing marketing methods. Companies like Elementor, Beaver Builder and Divi are far behind in terms of marketing skills compared to Thrive themes’ Shane Melaugh. I doubt they will ever catch up. (Divi calls their Thrive Leads competitor – “Bloom Email Opt-ins”. Thrive sells you leads, while Divi sells you Email Opt-ins. Rookie marketing mistake of selling features vs benefits)

This means their customer base is growing faster than ever. They have been eating market shares of other competitors. And that ultimately translates to more business and clients for consultants like me.

So will I switch from their tools? You tell me.

14th December 2017