Why I Left Clickfunnels... And Where I Migrated My Membership Site To...

Key Takeaways

hey miles Beckler here miles becker.com in this video I'm going to discuss why I've left clickfunnels and I'm also going to explain where I moved my membership system to now that I've left clickfunnels so about a year year and a half ago I joined clickfunnels in order to move and migrate and kind of grow my membership system love the funnel aspect love the ability to test funnels quickly and to get my landing pages my sales Pages up relatively quickly but the challenge came in the actual membership site delivery uh first and foremost the their members area doesn't allow you much if any customization at all um there's no deep linking URLs to the different uh modules to the different lessons and overall it was just a poor user experience um the search function for example crashed it I reached out to their support uh we'll work on it at some point never got done another problem that arised was some of my paying customers were getting locked out of their membership system uh clickfunnels for some reason with an active membership sub subscription would simply cancel their access in clickfunnels even though they were still on monthly subscription I actually sat down I physically took my laptop and went to their support at the uh clickfunnels seminar that I went to and I sat down to show them because they weren't responding via email they were saying oh that's on your end oh that's not our problem the general pass the buuck kind of support that really aggravates me as a customer finally I sat down with them they did a temporary fix it was never fully resolved and and the final straw that broke the camels back was when I found out that I have dozens possibly hundreds of people who had access to my membership content who weren't on an active stripe subscription their subscription either cancelled they canceled it or a payment failed and for some reason clickfunnels did not pick this up and continued to give them access some people for over a year I've already found about seven or eight people who had access for over a year it's 44 $4 per year per person so I've already found thousands of dollars that have been um kind of dropped by clickfunnels and from my kind of research it looks like there's dozens if not hundreds of more people in that same sort of situation so I decided that was it once it hit my pocketbook and it was financially affecting me it was worth it to move and moving websites is and content Management Systems is always really challenging it's generally speaking a last resort to move everything over and that point it became a last resort so where did I move to uh I moved to a WordPress based system I realized that in dealing with their support and in dealing with their lack of support actually and the past the buck mentality they had I needed to be in a situation where I could hire developers and I could essentially be in control I need to be the captain of my ship I don't want to be a passenger on someone else's ship that's going in a destination that might not be where I want it to go so that's why I went to a WordPress base system the theme I'm using is Thrive themes and Thrive themes is fantastic for building the funnels on the front end but you also have what's called their Apprentice system if you've never seen it I'll actually I'll put a link below in the video um or you could Google Thrive Apprentice system and what it does is it allows you to create a module and lesson based layout so now I have different modules and different lessons for all of the products that get opened up for my customers um when they become members I've got a search function now I can deep link people directly to the lessons that I want them to go to plus I'm working on adding some really cool functionality like a forum that's going to be inside of there um and just really playing with the look and making it a great user experience you know at $37 a month um even though that's only what a125 $130 per day I still take that very seriously when our customers are paying that and I want to make sure that they're getting the best possible experience that they can and that's why we've literally spent over two and a half months and there were 10 different people who worked on it hired migration Specialists my team I have my wife and I uh literally hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars have gone into this migration so it was a wellth thought out idea and on my shopping cart I'm using Thrive cart which is a very simple shopping cart that allows me to run my funnel which is an opt-in to a dollar trial to a membership to an annual upsell I have a video on that uh funnel that's working very well for us right now and for the actual access I'm using active campaign and active member 360 active campaign is an email management system that has a tagging based system it's similar to confusion soft but it's very very simple to use and it's very userfriendly and their plug-in active member 360 uses the tags that are inside of active campaign to decide whether a specific user has access to certain content so a new user will get access to week one after they're through their week trial they get access to month one whereas a user who's 6 months in after they make their next payment they get access to month number seven and all of that drip content is done very intelligently through active campaign and active member 360 so this move was actually an email service provider move for me it was a platform move a Content management system it was a theme move it was intense to make this move and I'm so happy and I'm so thankful that I've made the move if you're building a membership system I highly highly recommend you consider creating an option that is not based on clickfunnels um they have let me down in a major way and it has cost me literally thousands of dollars and months of my time in backpedaling plus I had people who were getting access to my stuff for free and as a membership kind of site owner that's that's the part you know clickfunnels doesn't accidentally give their software to people for free so I don't know why it didn't work for me but it sure didn't so and their support wasn't really there to help me with it so when is clickfunnels a good idea right like I don't want this to be all trash shocking about clickfunnels um um clickfunnels is essentially A Step Above lead Pages if you are kind of trying to get your opt-in page going if you're trying to sell an ebook if you have a simple course that has three modules and four lessons in each module it's going to work perfect one-time products it works really well for that kind of stuff it was the annual and the monthly and the rebilling system that was required for the monthly membership that really made it not very well feasible all in all I think Thrive themes is a better option because you have full control it does require some WordPress skills and possibly bringing on a WordPress developer luckily you can find WordPress developers in the Philippines in India in Eastern Europe for5 to $10 per hour and they're really good at what they do um upwork.com is a great place to find them so if you were curious why I left clickfunnels if you were curious what my new marketing stack looks like there you have it I'm happy to answer any of your questions in here at this point the membership system is working brilliantly um I'm really excited about the future I'm now on a platform that I can continue to add functionality and that's really important to me and it's really important to my users I feel to to have that kind of best possible customer and user experience they can on clickfunnels that just simply wasn't there but on Thrive themes and WordPress I'm in control and that's where I feel like I need to be this is a long-term business I'm building and I take it very very seriously and that's why after literally months of of wondering am I going to move is it worth it God it's going to be a lot of work I did commit to the process and boy on the other end I'm thankful I did so if you're just starting membership system consider going straight to thrive themes and a WordPress plugin to manage that access I love active campaign and active member 360 it's working really really well and that's all for this video so I hope to have more positive exciting stuff about what I'm doing my funnels I just launched another new funnel myself over the weekend why not launch another funnel after you just finish your membership system maybe I'm a crazy workaholic maybe I'm just excited to get stuff out and I'll update you on that as it comes thanks again for watching give me a thumbs up here in YouTube if you like the video if you have any questions for me leave them in the comments I'm happy to answer your questions if you'd like to share what your marketing stack is I'd love to know what you're working with and how you've built your systems your funnels and your membership program and finally go ahead and subscribe so you can get those videos when they come out thanks again for your time have a great day see you on the next video