Learning Management and WordPress: LifterLMS with Chris Badgett

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Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of How I Built It, the podcast that asks “How did you build that?” You might be thinking, say, “Joe, you sound a little different.” I have a brand new microphone that I’m using for Season Three that I’m really excited about. I’ll link it in the show notes. It’s the Sterling Audio ST51. It’s a great condenser mic. But that’s not what we’re talking about today. I’m here with my guest Chris Badgett of LifterLMS. Chris, how are you doing today?

Chris Badgett: I’m doing great. Thanks for having me on the show.

Joe Casabona: Thanks for being on the show. I really appreciate it. I think it’s, is it your wife reached out to me maybe?

Chris Badgett: No, just somebody in my company, Ali.

Joe Casabona: Oh man, for some reason I thought it was the same last name but I guess not. So yeah. So Ali reached out to me and asked if I would have you on the show and absolutely I’ve heard a lot of great things about LifterLMS. My friend Shawn Hesketh, who was a guest on the show, mentioned you guys a few times, so very excited to talk to you about this, especially because online learning has gotten very popular especially in the WordPress space I feel in the last few years. But before we get into that, why don’t you tell us a little bit about who you are, and what your product does, and how you came up with the idea?

Chris Badgett: All right. Well I’m definitely scratch your own itch kind of guy. So I’m a course creator. Before that just very briefly, I’m a big outdoor person. So almost my 20s, I lived on a glacier in Alaska. You can only get there by helicopter and I used to manage a remote sled dog tour business and it was during that time that I got interested in WordPress and I can’t really explain it but I just got interested in it. I got interested in marketing but a lot of my like leadership skills and team building skills and input empathy skills, it all comes from a lot of time outdoors working with great people and great animals. So that’s where all that comes from. And I’m also a dad. That’s a big part of what I do is a big motivator for working at home building online courses. For me, it started out as a passive income business and also as a way to do a project with my wife who’s big into organic farming and gardening. So our first courses work in the organic gardening and permaculture niche. I started flying to two different parts of the world to film, like in the jungle, some permaculture design courses which is the niche within inorganic. And it’s through all that and through building up a WordPress agency and wanting to start a product that you know, that’s kind of the origin of who I am and kind of where Lifter a part of where lifter comes from ’cause it’s bigger than just me.

Joe Casabona: Wow, that is fascinating. I’m gonna say that that’s probably the most interesting introduction I’ve had on the show. So are you still in Alaska?

Chris Badgett: No, I’m currently on the coast of Maine.

Joe Casabona: Nice, oh nice. so we’re on, we’re in the same time zone which is cool.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, we’re close.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, very nice, so that’s awesome. So scratch your own itch that has been a running theme throughout basically all of the episodes of How I Built It. And you said that you, most of your, you specifically mentioned empathy, right? Which is something that I’ve been preaching a lot because you need to empathize with your students, right? You need to understand what they’re going through so I know this is a bit of an off the cuff question but can you give us like a quick tip on how to kind of connect and empathize with your students through an online course? Because I teach online, I teach in person. It’s a lot easier to empathize in person ’cause you could see the confused faces of your students but it’s a little harder online., right?

Chris Badgett: Yeah. I would say empathy is one of my superpowers and it’s how I was able to build up agents of WordPress agencies within some of our projects that were over six figures like big projects. And then listening to customers, and also just you know, interacting with non technical people but also with technical people. But in a teaching context it’s all about getting out of the building. And one of the things I do as a software CEO is I actually spend about two hours a day talking to prospective customers and existing customers. Anybody can schedule a 15 minute call with me in a fight to do that I would be operating in a vacuum. And so that’s what I’d recommend we do and not to get caught in this whole passive income trap. It’s good to do things that don’t scale and actually go talk to people. You don’t have to talk to everybody but definitely you wanna be talking to your customers and your prospective customers or new adjacent markets that you’re thinking about selling into because get out of your head and you know get out of the room, get out of the building.

Joe Casabona: Nice, I really like that advice, that’s great advice especially it’s good to do things that don’t scale, right? ’cause I mean that everyone is like how to scale your business? How I made six figures in five minutes doing 4 minutes of work. So that’s great, right? The four hour workweek in my opinion is a myth because you’re not doing, you’re not working, right? Like you’re not connecting with your customers and things like that so that’s great advice. So you run an agency, you talk to your customers, so I’m curious what kind of research did you do in creating LifterLMS?

Chris Badgett: Well not as much as you might think you know. When I was running an agency I shared my company. I just, it was after my last name ‘Badgett in media’. Later I merged it with another business called ‘Codebox’ and that’s what we ran our agency under and LifterLMS is actually a product of Codebox. But in terms of market research, I wrote a blog post. I’ve written lots of blog posts but on blog post number 80 about WordPress or marketing related or entrepreneur related things, I started blogging about my experience building online courses with WordPress. And unlike all my other blog posts that would get like a little bit of traffic, you know, the reality spoke up and I got lots of questions, lots of comments and I’m like there’s something here. So that kind of gave me that initial kind of demand indicator. And because I’ve already been doing it like I started building that original permaculture pub course publishing site on a WordPress LMS theme, I got off of themeforest and I had looked at the different plugins out there. I tried Sensei for a little while. I kind of knew how it all worked and then I wanted to laser focus on some really specific problems that I had as a course creator that none of the solutions met. And that’s kind of the end of the market research pace.

Joe Casabona: Nice, and just like you open the show with you scratch your own itch, and I love that. That’s because, this is I think it’s probably base camp or what was 37 signals before like they say things like that, right? We built base camp ’cause we needed something and then we realized we could sell it. And it sounds like you took the same approach and now you have a very popular LMS for WordPress and that’s something. I tried to build that in like 2009 but I was like fresh faced, like right out of college and like I had no idea how to do any of that. And I also didn’t understand the GPL and that was a big, it’s like a big thing. But it’s you know, I’m glad to see that a few years later WordPress is blossoming into like a nice place that people can go to develop online courses.

Chris Badgett: Absolutely.

Joe Casabona: Cool. So I’m gonna read this question verbatim ’cause I think we’re in the same position here. I have recently found out that talking it out with people helps, right? So I know you have a podcast of your own but do you have a mastermind group of anything? Do you talk to anybody about business advice and direction things like that?

Chris Badgett: Yes, I talked to a lot of people. One of the, I have just friends in my network. I have friends in corporate. Some of my biggest business insights actually come out of corporate. I’m one of the most anti corporate guys you can meet but I have good friends who work in corporate and do big business. And I learn a lot just from other industries like global finance and things that I’m not necessarily working in but I pull insights out of other places. In terms of you know, I have a business partner and that’s a big part of why I’m the non technical cofounder, so my technical cofounder we work really well together. I’d say if we could talk about it more, if you wanted to, that would be one of the biggest secrets to success is to not do it all by yourself and not try to outsource the leadership of one of those sides.

And then the other thing is I’m always looking to, I’m an introvert by nature, but I love connecting with few people very deeply. But I still do things like, for example, I went to the CaboPress Mastermind Event that was great. You know, Chris Lemon, all the great companies that were there and great facilitators and all that. So I’m actively looking to, you know, work with people, learn from each other, add value where I can learn, where I can, I try to get back as much as I possibly can. And I think a big part of it is actually masterminding with my customers. We have a very active Facebook group when people come in there they’re like “Oh my gosh! Why is this Facebook group so active?” Well, it’s because you know we keep quality high and we talk about all the issues that surround course creators, not just technology tools. And it creates this hivemind. So yeah, I’m a big fan of not doing things in isolation.

Joe Casabona: That’s awesome. That is awesome for a couple reasons because I think getting it active in Facebook group is very difficult. I’ve got you know, several dozen students at WP in one month and I like, I emailed them monthly to let them know when I’m working on and stuff like that, and I was like “Oh, I created a Facebook group so you guys can like ask questions there” and like just nothing. Not a single person signed up so I’ll wait till I have you know, I’ll mention that again. But creating a good community especially in online learning is very important. And so surrounding a hivemind, surrounding a product is really cool. Also you mentioned CaboPress which I will be going to this year, I’m super excited. Chris Lemon’s a good friend of mine and I’ve heard nothing but good things about it like everyone’s like it was great and transformative and I learned a lot. So I’m very excited for that. And it’s really good to see that you know you mentioned in, you’re introverted but you connect with people deeply. I think that’s what you said. so very important in a lot of things but, you know, you don’t want to stay in a silo when you’re creating a business right? ‘Cause I’m a programmer and like the way I perceive things is probably not the way a lot of people perceive things or like if you have a lot of users you’re going to get those use cases that are like “Oh man, I never thought of using my product this way” right? I’m sure you get that with Lifter.

Chris Badgett: Absolutely.

Joe Casabona: So cool. So now here is the title question, right? You mentioned that you are the non technical, the non technical owner in this business, right? So I’m curious to know like so how did you built LifterLMS? and this could be if you wrote code or or how you built up the marketing side of things or you know, kind of whatever you want to take this question in whatever direction?

Chris Badgett: Absolutely. I’m a non technical co-founder but I’m a WordPress power user. I feel like they built WordPress for me [inaudible13.48.9] just like for non technical people. I just fell in love with it and very quickly I was able to start building an agency just by implementing without custom design and development. But in terms of how we built it, it all started with as an agency like a lot of WordPress agencies, or marketing agencies, design agencies we wanted to have a product. I love agency work, we’ve worked with some great clients but we really wanted a scalable product. And so when we were looking like well what kind of product could we make, what we got really advanced into marketing automation stuff and you know, high end membership sites and things. But we had that that focus on that specialty and built software tools that stack on top of membership sites and online courses at scale that were all custom built. And so it was kind of an obvious choice to be like, “OK, we’re going to do something at the membership or online course community” and you know I do it myself so I’d like I could really represent the customer.” A lot of what I do is I represent the customer ’cause I can switch from business owner to marketer to thinking like the customer like the end user, to thinking about the customers customer which is the student. So what I would like to say is if we don’t know what to do just forget everybody and focus on the in student ’cause if that in student is getting results and anything that’s the right decision to make if you’re like trying to figure something out.

But in terms of how we built it, we bootstrapped it with agency profits and we focused on we, you know, we did a marketing thing where we, you know, we pre sold the idea, built the email list, got interest when we first launched it we only had 42 customers. It launched as a paid product and it was later that we went Freemium and you know, for we’re about three years into it. And it was you know, growth in the beginning was slow, slow, slow, slow. Then you know just kept trending up and then the move into Freemium brought it an add-on model you know, got really quickly. And then you know, within the past year we’re able to really focus on the product side of business and spool down the client side of what we do. So that’s kind of the arc of it all.

Joe Casabona: Nice, that’s awesome. I think a lot of people, myself included, think like I’m gonna launch a business and I’m gonna be up here but you’re down here for a while. And it’s either a slow build or some people say entrepreneurship is like the hockey stick model, right? Where one day you’re down here and then kind of shoot straight up but either way that’s great to see it’s really a game of patience. And I love what you said about focusing on the customers’ customers. It reminded me of a lesson that I got from a Carfax commercial, right? like Carfax is not, we are not carfaxes customers. The car dealer is Carfax’s customer but their ads are advertised to us so that we go and ask for it. And then the car dealers were like “Well, our customers wanted” so we had to get it. So just maybe think about I love that you know, focusing on the students, getting results especially ’cause completion rates for online courses are not great and building a better LMS and providing education which I know you do to your blog and your podcast for course creators is very important to kind of help improve those numbers because you know, we want our students to succeed. We want people to keep coming back to the courses. We’re not sitting for the money. We’re in it to teach people, hopefully.

Chris Badgett: Right.

Joe Casabona: Cool. So you mentioned that it started as a paid product and it went to freemium. What are some of the other transformations that your product has gone through since it first launched? Maybe you could talk about what like how you made the decision to make it free or what you made free, and what you decided would be a paid add-on?

Chris Badgett: Well I think starting with free or starting with paid is important because you’re really validating it. ‘Cause if you launch a free product and then you’re like “I’ll figure out how to make a pro version later” you’re just delaying the feedback loop to realize if you have a decent idea that’s worth sticking to. So that’s you know, that’s why we wanted to start as a premium product and we didn’t necessarily, you know, if we could sell that we knew that one day as part of our mission I’ve done a lot of international travel and spent time in underdeveloped parts of the world. We wanted to have a free product that could serve you know, emerging entrepreneurs and all over the world where they don’t have to pay a dollar if they can get WordPress going. And this was always part of the vision. But we needed to make sure that we could, you know, support ourselves and fund the development, fund the support. So we started with paid and then the reason to go free was just to implement basically our original vision and it literally only took less than 30 days for the revenue from paid to be replaced by the add-on model. That’s just the power of WordPress and I mean maybe if you’re starting out if you are gonna start out with premium I would recommend on day one also having the pro version or the add-on or whatever so that you have at least some kind of you might be able to re read the best of both worlds. So that was a transition we had at LifterLMS 3.0 that was a transition for us back in September. And we basically, it had like a ton of new features, we rebuilt the E-commerce engine, and the recurring payments engine from the ground up and how people could access courses and membership levels and these sorts of things. And we pulled out some things that were in the free product at the time which was the WooCommerce integration and the PayPal integration. We rebuilt both those from the ground up, made it woo subscriptions compatible and some other more fancy stuff and PayPal. That was a tough transition for us. I didn’t communicate as well as I could have leading up into that/. So we had some customers that weren’t the transition that they, then it didn’t sit well with him and it. But at the end of the day it was something we had to do as a company for just the long term sustainability of the project. So that as an entrepreneur, that was a really tough moment. It was something we had to do but that is you know, that was one of those transition points.

Joe Casabona: Nice, and that’s maybe the biggest turtle like keeping me from getting into a proper product space. I mean I guess at a plugin product space right ’cause I have products or courses. But transitions like that, making decisions and then it’s I mean it’s a lot of time communicating with your customers is like communicating with your client it has to be clear and frequent and you know, you need to understand. But that’s good. I’m glad to see you’re through that and that sounds ultimately, it sounds like a really nice feature set because I know that with other LMS is you have to kind of play with strings in the background to make certain things like that work. So it’s, that’s like the WooCommerce subscriptions integration sounds awesome. And what are your plans for the future? So 3.0 came out in September what do you have coming down the Pike next?

Chris Badgett: So the original vision with LifterLMS one of the key problems we wanted to solve was to avoid like you’re talking about pulling strings in the background of what I call the software Frankenstein. So from day one, some people don’t realize that LifterLMS has its own recurring payment engine stripe integration PayPal. It’s all built in so our WooCommerce integration is simply optional for people who for whatever reason need to use Woo like maybe there’s a payment gateway they need or advanced tax rules or they’re selling other products. But, so what we did in the beginning is we integrated the LMS for the course quiz lesson, all that stuff with an E-commerce engine with its own membership functionality so that you can, you know, courses and lessons are locked down automatically. You don’t need a third party membership system. You can sell bundles of courses with memberships and things of that nature.

And then the 4th part we did is we took some of the best thinking out of our history in marketing automation Infusionsoft and built it like an engagement system which has badges and certificates. But also personalized emails like you can get places like Infusionsoft, Active Campaign, MailChimp and these kinds of things. So we integrated all that into one cohesive whole.

So that was step 1. Step 2, where we’re going now is I’m really attacking that problem that you’re talking about. There’s data on this and research forward a 10% or 6 to 10% completion rate on average for the online courses out there. The Mook’s and all these names for online education and there’s different ways we’re attacking that. We’re attacking that through developing around three different areas. One area has to do with social learning and community so there’s some things we’re building around that. We already have a buddypress integration but there’s just more coming on its own even without buddypress to provide social learning environments. The other thing that’s going on is a lot of courses and marketing make a promise but the course doesn’t necessarily map to real-world results. So we’re coming up with a way to actually, if a course you know, makes a promise that we have a reality check mechanism in there to create quantifiable results which then helps the core sell, which helps students get better results, and track their progress and that sort of thing.

And then the last thing is just, we’re really working on features that help students learn and have autonomy and control over their learning experience. And also for teachers especially non technical teachers to be able to do their things and deliver really amazing learning experiences. So there’s a ton of features and all that but that’s the big vision.

Joe Casabona: That’s great and that’s again that’s something that I’m wrestling with over at WPM in one month as I want. I kind of took the approach like well if people want to learn stuff they’re gonna take the course. But social media is so important and I learned that from Troy Dean, he was on the show earlier last year but I guess earlier this year I’m trying to figure out when I recorded it. And you know, he talked about the importance of social and leaderboards and things like that. So that sounds great. I’m really excited to see what you guys come up with next and when it comes out. Fun note about the word ‘Mook’, I first heard that when I was working at the University of Scranton and our vice president of technology said it. And that term stands for what “massive open online community” or something like that.

Chris Badgett: Online course

Joe Casabona: Online courses, right? I did not know that from an Italian from New York so it has a completely different meaning to me. And I was flabbergasted that like my vice president would say that derogatory term and my coworker explained to me what it was. So the first time I heard that term, I was like floored that this kind of language was allowed at the University of Scranton. Cool. So we are approaching time. So before we get to the bonus questions I would like to ask you my favorite question and you’ve already given such great advice here, but do you have any trade secrets for us?

Chris Badgett: For which part? For being a bit better online course teacher, being a software entrepreneur?

Joe Casabona: This is dealers choice so you know, you can pick your favorite or one of each if you have them both kind of at the ready but this is up to you. What’s your favorite piece of advice or your favorite trade secret?

Chris Badgett: For the software entrepreneur, I’m going to say partnership. It’s all about the future partnership. So if you’re, there’s very rarely that developer, genius mind, marketer, CEO mind, kind of growth mind all-in-one. So partnership is key for that and I would, I do mean like an equity partner ’cause I see, when you look at companies in the same industry and one is outsourcing either the marketing or the development, if you have two partners side-by-side and one’s in charge of each, much better results quicker.

In terms of teaching, I would say you need to have a feedback loop and avoid the passive income trap. Passive income is good and you can definitely do it but you need to have a feedback loop where you get, you see how your students are doing. And you, the courses that do really well like you mentioned Shawn of WP101, I know he’s constantly refining his lessons keeping up to date with WordPress, listening to where people get stuck and that kind of thing. And when you have that feedback loop, and you listen to it, and you implement it based on what you learn, that’s how you create a world class learning experience.

Joe Casabona: That’s awesome. I love that. There’s somebody once told me, there’s no truly passive income. It might have been Shawn, actually. He has, he always has those one liners ready for me. There’s no truly passive income, right? And when it comes to online learning that’s definitely the case.

So Chris, thank you so much for joining me today. I really appreciate you taking the time.

This is a new segment and it’s going to be just bonus questions. I was going to call it Fast Five but I have six here. So the first five questions just answer the first thing that comes to your mind and the last one is a little bit more in depth. So what’s your favorite book at the moment?

Chris Badgett: I’m actually rereading ‘The Lean Startup’. I read it a long time ago but I’m just rereading it and there’s a lot of just great fundamental truths in there.

Joe Casabona: Nice. On my reading list, so I’m definitely going to check that out. What is music that inspires you?

Chris Badgett: Lately when I get in the zone I listen to, I just look for no lyric electronic techno music that’s like chill on YouTube.

Joe Casabona: Nice. I have a Spotify playlist. I gotta send you that. What’s your favorite food?

Chris Badgett: I like spicy stuff so pad Thai.Cchili with lots of chilies.

Joe Casabona: Nice, nice. What is your favorite sports team? If you have one.

Chris Badgett: I’ve always been a wilderness guy so I would say one of my business and life mentors, his name’s ‘Linwood Fiedler’ he runs the Iditarod every year. I worked with him for a long time.

Joe Casabona: Nice. That I’m so glad that you are the first answer to that question cause like my answer would be the Yankees and like yeah, everybody likes the Yankees. One thing you wish you knew when you first started a…let’s say your software business?

Chris Badgett: I would say just, I am a patient man but just even more patience.

Joe Casabona: I like that. And the last question which might take a little bit more thought but it’s one that fascinates me. How did you learn what you know? And again, in regards to the software development business.

Chris Badgett: I’m all about experiential learning, so just learning by doing. So you know, I first learned WordPress by watching YouTube videos. We’re actually competitors like you and me Joe. I have a course on Udemy called How to build a WordPress website in a weekend. I made that a long time ago. I made it to just have fun and start making content. But learning by doing is what it’s all about and admitting when you make mistakes. Always do the right thing, and you know, surround yourself with great people ’cause you can’t do it alone.

Joe Casabona: Awesome. I love that. Learn by doing. Everybody, that’s one of my favorite things to tell people especially when you’re developing, if you’re working on your computer you’re probably not gonna blow something up. So just try something. If it breaks, undo it. Not great advice for the medical field but for the software field it’s great advice.

All right. Chris, again thank you so much for joining me today. I really appreciate it. I had a great time talking to you.

Chris Badgett: Thanks for having me on the show. Joe’s really fun to hang out.

Joe Casabona: All right. Make sure to check Chris Badgett out at, is it LifterLMS.com?

Chris Badgett: That’s right.

Joe Casabona: LifterLMS.com.

Thanks everybody for listening. Until next time, get out there and build something.

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