Which Software is Perfect for your Online Business

How many pieces of software are you paying for in your business—and do you actually know what all of them do? 

In this episode, we’re talking about why it’s so easy to get caught in the cycle of buying the latest tools, apps, and software recommendations, only to end up with a more complicated business and a pile of monthly subscriptions.

Instead of buying software because someone else says you need it, we’re shifting the focus to a much more important question: What problem are you actually trying to solve?

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Transcript

Stop Buying Tools From FOMO

Carrie Saunders 0:00

How many pieces of software are you paying for in your business right now? And maybe a better question is do you know what all of them actually do? Because a lot of things I see on the internet or in customers that come to us is somebody you know, somebody famous, somebody cool, you know, has this software and they're like, you really need to get this software. And then we fall in the trap of fear missing out, and we go and get the software without understanding what it does and how it helps us first. And then we have the subscription and we don't know why we're paying for it. So today I want to talk about why I think we need to stop buying software just because someone else tells us we need it and start asking a much more important question. What problem am I actually trying to solve? Let's dive in. Struggling to turn website traffic into real sales, you're not alone and you don't have to figure it out all yourself. Welcome to Smarter Online Business, the podcast for course creators, coaches, and e-commerce entrepreneurs who want their websites to convert visitors into buyers without the tech overwhelm. I'm your host, Carrie Saunders, a website strategist and conversion expert with over 20 years of experience. Each episode delivers simple, proven strategies to help you generate more revenue and make your website your smartest sales tool.

The Technology Junk Drawer Problem

Carrie Saunders 1:16

Welcome back to the show. Today we're talking about what can happen very commonly in businesses, and that is software bloat and buying software or paying for subscriptions that we don't actually use. So most of us have that drawer, right? You have a drawer that's got batteries in it, it might have tape in it, it might have a few random keys you don't even know where they go to anymore. They maybe have a phone charger that you haven't used in like 10 years, random screws that we feel like we need and we're afraid to get rid of. And businesses can develop basically that right there, a technology junk drawer. Except this junk drawer charges you your credit card month after month after month. Typically, you may have signed up for something a couple years ago because you needed this one specific feature, and then you added another tool and another, and maybe one of those tools actually does what that original software did, but you didn't let go of it and switch and you know consolidate. And you may not even remember why you're paying for one of them. Your software junk drawer is a lot more expensive than that junk drawer in your kitchen, that's for sure. So I want to talk about this because I find that you know it's just so easy to fall into this trap. We feel like we need the newest, latest, shiny object. You might hear so-and-so using this, and you might think, oh great, I need to use that, but their business is not your business. We need to be looking at software from the perspective of will this fit my business? This is something we help clients with a lot, is helping them determine what software suits them best for their business needs. Now, sure, we support specific shopping cart software. Right now, we support Magento, WooCommerce, Shopify, and Xcart, as well as some BigCommerce. We also support on the other side of it, uh, on the course creator side, Go High Level and Kajabi are their two main that we support over there. We also can help with Kit and other um email service providers. We also use AWeb ourselves. But when somebody comes to us with a technical issue or business issue, and they want to figure out are they using the right software, I don't automatically magically say, oh, you need to use Magento or you need to use Go High Level or something like that. I ask them business questions and see what their goals are, what they're trying to do, and what they're trying to accomplish before I help, you know, advise as to which software sounds the best option for them. We need to be doing this for ourselves too. So even if you don't utilize us to help you pick out what software is appropriate for you, you need to be going through these critical questions yourself. So I want to challenge you next time you're presented with a new piece of software that might be a good fit for you. I want you to ask, what problem am I trying to solve? And do I already have software that can solve the same problem? Sometimes people forget to do that last question. Do I already have software that solves the same problem? Because sometimes we do. So we need to be buying solutions to problems, not software in search of a problem or just because somebody else got it.

The Real Cost Beyond The Price

Carrie Saunders 4:24

So let's talk about cost of technology bloat and software bloat. So even if that piece of software that you're paying for costs you $29 a month, maybe it's not very expensive. Well, that's $384 a year. Okay, still not too expensive in the grand scheme of things of what a typical business has for expenses. But that's not its entire cost. Someone has to set it up, they need to learn it, they need to train the team. If you have a team, they need to integrate it with whatever other systems you have, they need to maintain that integration, they need to troubleshoot it when something breaks, they need to remember where the data lives. You have another login now, another billing relationship, another system holding customer data potentially, if it has customer data in it, and another place to look when something goes wrong. So it's not just about that $348 a year. The price of software isn't the same thing as the cost of software. It is also the mental and technical load that that's in your brain and in your business's systems and brain.

Consolidation That Saves Thousands

Carrie Saunders 5:29

So, for example, we have one of our clients in our course creator suite. You can find out more information at coursecreatorsuite.com. It's our white label version of Go High Level, and people are loving it. But one thing that our one client did was she did, she's recently she's working on switching to Go High Level from Kajabi and from other systems and other platforms. So what she's doing is not following necessarily the shiny object of our nice white label that we've had for about a year now, but she is consolidating her technology and her software. She's actually in the end going to be saving over $2,000 a year using our Course Creator Suite. Now, what's the great thing about that? Is she replacing, I'm not quite sure how many. I haven't asked her how many. She did tell me over $2,000, but I know she's replacing at least three different softwares with it. So she's saving money on subscriptions, she's saving like technical debt on having to integrate all these systems and making sure they work together. This is going to make her customer journey and her customer flow much better. So this time, following, let's call it a shiny object, for example, is going to be beneficial to her because she's reducing her costs and she's reducing her technical debt in all the places that she has to log in. So for this situation, this is definitely a win-win for her. So when you're thinking of trying that new software out or trying that new platform, we need to be thinking of it long-term-wise too and strategically. The really nice thing about the white lip our course creator suite is it's going to grow with her. There's lots of features in it that she's not using yet, and that's okay because she can use those features when she needs them in the future for no extra charge to her. So that can be the beauty of really looking at is this software a good fit for me and what problem is it solving, rather than just following somebody's suggestion just to follow somebody's suggestion.

When Keeping Two Tools Makes Sense

Carrie Saunders 7:27

Now, on the flip side, we don't always consolidate just to consolidate. Us, for example, we use our own software, course creator suite, for our course creator and coach side of our business. However, we still use a Webber, which is an email service provider, for our email news list. So even though that feature is in Go High Level in our course creator suite, we are not using that feature in course creator suite. So we don't always consolidate just to consolidate. Now I did have to make a very purposeful decision and know that there is going to be a little bit more technical debt getting the two systems to connect together and having to make sure that they stay connected, you know, when one updates, you know, their software. But I made that decision because we already had a lot of things in a weber. We already knew how to use it really well. Um, I kind of liked having the focused area for newsletter sending and for landing pages. Now we do use Go High Level, um, our course creator suite version of it for landing pages too. But in some cases it makes sense to put our landing page in a Weber. So sometimes we do use a couple pieces of software, even though they might overlap. But what I did was I made a purposeful business decision to do that, not just a oh, I forgot that this could do that, and I'm paying for both just because I didn't analyze anything. So I made a conscious decision. So that's a little bit different, and we want to make sure if we do that, it's a conscious decision to have our systems split across a couple different

Audit Your Subscriptions With Key Questions

Carrie Saunders 9:02

places. So what I want you to do after this episode, and and you can go to our show notes if you need a review of what these questions are at smarteronbindbusiness.com. But I want you to pull up your credit card statement for the past month, month and a half to make sure you catch all the charges. And I want you to figure out I want you to list all the software you're being charged for. And then I want you to ask these questions. What problem does this software solve? I want you to also ask, do I already own something else that does this feature? Does this replace something, or am I just adding something new and for not a really good business reason? What's the real cost? We talked about the money that goes to your card, but what's the also technical debt behind it? And are we actually using it? So if you're answering, you know, the negative answer to some of these, then you might want to reevaluate whether you need that software or not. It's a good idea to you do this about once a year. We actually are going to be switching out our uh social media management software. It renews in September, and we're going to be switching it out and using the native Go High Level or Course Creator Suite scheduler for our social media scheduling. So we're going to be saving over $500 a year by getting rid of a software that we like and we enjoy, but why do we need to log into another place to go and post social media when we're already in Course Creator Suite, our version of Go High Level, all the time. So here we're going to be doing, we we evaluated our own this year, and that is one of the pieces of software we are going to

Build A Purposeful Software Stack

Carrie Saunders 10:39

drop. So the whole goal of this episode is to help you realize when you need to reevaluate your software. I want you to be spending intentionally on your software, and it needs to have a good purpose and a good place in your business. I don't want you to be buying software just because it's a new shiny object and so-and-so has it and you think it's going to work for you. You know, yes, sometimes you do need to try things before you really dig into them. I'm not saying don't do that, but we need to be making purposeful decisions on when we make that software switch and make sure it's a good idea to do it. So technology should make your business better, it should save you time, it should solve problems, it should improve your customer experience, it should also help your team grow. And sometimes that means adding a new tool. And sometimes it means consolidating three tools into one. And sometimes it means intentionally keeping a software tool because it is really good at what it does. Sometimes it's okay to have your tasks split across a couple different ones. There's no perfect software stack other than the one that you've purposely built for you with purposeful, not accidental decisions.

Share The Show And Wrap Up

Carrie Saunders 11:47

Thank you for listening to the Smarter Online Business Podcast. We hope you thoroughly enjoyed this podcast episode. And we would be so honored if you would share it with a friend. That is the biggest compliment to us when you share our podcast episodes. And we appreciate it when each and every one of you do that. And we will see you next week.