SPI 802: A Reaction to ConvertKit’s BOLD Business Moves

SPI 802: A Reaction to ConvertKit’s BOLD Business Moves

Announcer: You’re listening to the Smart Passive Income Podcast, a proud member of the Entrepreneur Podcast Network, a show that’s all about working hard now, so you can sit back and reap the benefits later. And now your host. His toxic trait is thinking he could survive one of those survival shows that puts you alone out in the wild. Pat Flynn!

Pat Flynn: Two days ago, a company that I’ve been working with for 11 years, 10 years now has made a huge announcement. And this is something that I’ve known about for a while because I’m on the board of this company. And it’s something that I was a little bit involved with. You know, I’ve had a little bit of a say in things, but not, obviously I’m not the decision maker, but as advisor, we give advice to the company.

The company that I’m talking about is ConvertKit. However, by the time you listen to this, you might’ve already heard, ConvertKit. In fact, they might have already changed their name to just Kit. Not Just Kit. Kit, Kit.com. First of all, three letter domain name, huge. I don’t want to talk about the domain name.

I want to talk about this decision and all the nuances around it. I think there’s a lot to unpack here. And I’m not going to give you a lot of quote unquote insider stuff. I’m going to talk about what is already known in public at this point. Two days ago, Nathan at the craft and commerce event, which is Kits event or ConvertKits event, he made the announcement.

In fact, he made several announcements. Another thing that goes along with this are the studios that he’s opening up in Boise, Idaho that are freely available for ConvertKit users, five different rooms inside of a space. I actually got to visit the space before it was decorated. And they brought in a company to change these empty rooms into recording studios, three of them used for video podcasting and audio podcasting, and the other two can be used for things like recording a little bit more private.

So they’re for recording courses or things like that. YouTube videos. And again, they’re free for all Kit users, which is really amazing. They also announced an app store that allows developers to create things that can then talk to and work with ConvertKit and ConvertKit users can then get access to those things.

And some of these things are amazing. One of them allows you, if you are a YouTuber, to connect your YouTube account and automatically using AI, write a newsletter based on videos that you create. And I got a chance to test drive this thing, one of the apps inside of ConvertKit, and holy moly, it writes it in my voice because it’s using the style guide from my videos.

So I speak how I speak in my videos, and it understands the nuances of that, and then is able to take the information in that video and summarize it into something that you can use for a newsletter. So you can have, in a way, A mostly automated newsletter that is actually coming from you. AI is not creating the content.

It’s understanding your content and being able to write in a way that you speak on camera. So some really amazing announcements from Nathan and I want to congratulate Nathan and the entire ConvertKit team, the executive team, especially who I was with about a month ago in Boise before the announcement to go over some of the just scenarios around this event. And again, I’m just really proud of Nathan and what he’s done. He’s got an entire video about the rebrand and some of the changes and stuff and where he’s coming from. And I recommend you watch that even if you’re not a ConvertKit user, there’s some.

Big lessons to be learned here. One thing that’s interesting about what ConvertKit’s doing this time is they are rebranding in public. So they are not, like, they don’t have a new logo because they want to take you on that journey. And they’re opening up their doors a bit to show you what this is like and how it works and the decisions that were made.

And I think this is really cool. It allows the public, it allows the users to hold them accountable, which is something that happened after a rebrand, I think four or five years ago, four or five years ago, ConvertKit rebranded to Seva. S E V A, which in I think Sanskrit means like selfless service or something like that, which was a good sentiment.

However, that word for that religion should be untouched and to use it for commerce and to use it to market, it just set a terrible tone and ConvertKit was more wanting to announce that in secret. They made a very similar announcement on stage. I was there. And people were, you know, even people who didn’t know about the meaning behind that word or where it came from or who has access or should be the rightful users of that word were still like, well, what does this mean?

This is such a different change. And it was a bit of a stretch. And so they took it back and that domain name, which I’m sure costs a lot of money was kind of a waste and, you know, of course, bad publicity around that. And they managed to fight through it, which was really cool. And they got a second chance.

And here they are with a brand that isn’t too off of what the brand already was. So ConvertKit, just removing the convert part and just becoming Kit. It’s really interesting. Cause when you go back into Nathan Berry, who’s the CEO, when you go back into his blogs from way back in the day, and the reason why he chose ConvertKit is because he wanted it to be more than just about email.

He wanted it to be a Kit of things that can help you with managing your business. He started out by. Writing eBooks and selling them. He used to be a designer still as a designer in a way, but he designed these app design handbooks and web design handbooks, things like that. And he sold them through his website.

He was a guest here on the podcast back in like the two hundreds. I mean, we’re in the eight hundreds now, which is insane. But 600 episodes ago, Nathan was on talking about selling these eBooks. This was even before ConvertKit was a thing and using email to do that. But email not having all the capabilities that he wanted.

So we ended up building ConvertKit to solve his problems, to allow him to sell the books in the way that he wanted to. Then came the decision point to go full force, full time with ConvertKit and drop his books, even though they were making six figures a year. He wanted to build this software and he took me along the ride in 2014 as an advisor and it’s been incredible because not only am I an affiliate and have generated a lot of revenue from that, but it’s become a tool that we use to generate revenue.

It has become an amazing experience to be on the advisory board and to be able to help make decisions with this team and to see where they’re at now and where they’re going is pretty amazing. So I want to read some of the announcement for you, and then I’m going to share some thoughts in and around this.

And again, whether you are a Kit user or not, or a ConvertKit user who will now become a Kit user, or if you use something else, I again, think there are a lot of lessons to be learned here. So here’s what their big blog post, their big announcement said. So the create economy has evolved a lot since ConvertKit began 11 years ago, and we’ve evolved with it.

Our platform has grown far beyond its original function of helping creators like you convert your audience into customers. Today, you use our features to connect, grow, automate, launch, create, earn, and do so much more. It’s true. They’ve come out with so many more things, e commerce platform, not just the automations and email related things, but there’s so much there as far as what you can do with the email subscribers that you have on a record and how you can generate revenue from that. It’s, it’s pretty amazing. And my favorite thing that they’ve launched that I’m glad to say I’ve had some say in is their visual automation tools, the ability for you to kind of see what’s going on, not just like use code, but to actually easily see, okay, people come into this forum, they go here, then they get tagged with this, then they get put here and then, you know, a week later they get this set of emails. And then if they’re a customer, they go here. If they’re, if they’re not, they go there to do that with like a visual float chart is really amazing. You know, there were other tools that had done that before, but they were kind of the first to do it with just regular price plans that you might see in an email service provider.

So anyway, to continue, it’s clear you’re a creator who means business. As we look ahead to the next decade, we have big goals to help make your business even more valuable. So we’re making a change in service of this vision. So, what I love about this letter is it describes kind of where things were and where things are going, things that they’ve done already to kind of keep up.

But this is like a big change. And what I love about this in this announcement is they’ve made it relevant to me, right? The reader, they say, we have big goals to help make your business even more valuable, right? You use our features to do these things. You, you are a creator who means business. And you’ve heard me say this time and time again, whenever you’re addressing your audience use that word, you, not, you know, y’all creators, or all of you creators, every creator, it’s not as personal. This is a letter to everybody, but it still says creators like you, because they’re writing a letter to the creator. So then it says, so we’re making a change in service of this vision, we’re rebranding to Kit.

This is more than just a name change, I love how they address that right away, because that’s, you know, You know, people go, okay, so you changed the name. So what? Okay. It’s more than just the name change. As Kit, our product philosophy is all about scalability and giving you the actionable insights you need to grow your business.

And because each creator business is unique, the features in your Kit can be tailored just for you. So they’re already using the language of Kit as if this is like a toolbox, right? Which is kind of cool. We’re building the operating system for the creator economy. That starts with an app store where anyone can develop and expand on Kit to bring in extra tools, which is really smart.

I mean, this is the model that Apple had used to get their iOS store going and their app store going. I think in the world of email marketing, this is great. We’ve seen this in a lot of other tools. I think, you know, you obviously might have access to something like Zapier. A lot of other tools have integrations like Shopify.

It makes sense that an email service provider should It could allow others who have specialties, who have expertise, who have other tools to allow to connect versus like, okay, let’s just like compete and then create all those tools. No, let’s work with them. A central hub for your data with enhanced reporting to pull insights from.

This one I think is very underrated. I know that ConvertKit wants to do a lot more and I can speak to this because this is what this bullet point talks about. This idea of understanding more about who it is that is in your email subscriber base and not just like, okay, here’s where they’re from and here are the emails that they’ve opened, but a lot more insights, a lot more understanding of how they may overlap with other things that may be important to you, or perhaps even other creators and things like that.

Their Creator Network is probably the best thing that they’ve launched as of late to differentiate themselves. Quite honestly, and I’ve spoken about this before, they were quite kind of mid, kind of mediocre running for a number of years. And we’ve seen other competitors sprout up great competitors, right?

Like Beehive, but it seems like ConvertKit is answered and is different differentiating itself once again, and the biggest and best Creator Network to help you find new collaboration partners. We have the creator network. We get subscribers from it every single day, hundreds, and are excited about the connections that we’ve already made and the new connections that are happening there.

So this is cool because they have been in this business for a while. So they have all these people who use ConvertKit and they’re using the systems within to allow those people, myself included to connect with each other to share and support each other to have, you know, for example, me, I promote several other creators on the creator network who are also ConvertKit users.

On Smart Passive Income, on the blog and vice versa. We have hundreds of people who are promoting the Smart Passive Income Podcast, or excuse me, the newsletter, the Unstuck newsletter, which if you haven’t gone already, you should definitely check out SmartPassiveIncome.com/unstuck. This comes alongside improvements to features you already know and love.

And because we know scale matters, we’re investing in performance to ensure our platform works as fast as you do. I also love how they’re addressing that as well. Again, very kind of it’s not bolded, it’s kind of a passing comment here. Because we know that scale matters, we’re investing in performance to ensure our platform works as fast as you do.

I saw some comments right away from people after the announcement about the studios, saying like, oh, okay, you’re focusing on these things, you’re not even focusing on email anymore, like, the primary thing that you guys were supposed to build, but no, they’re addressing that right here and saying, no, we’re doing all of these things.

Right, and they also announced very recently a newsletter plan, which is insane. And their newsletter plan is our free plan. It’s 10,000 subscribers for free, which is absolutely crazy. So if you actually go to SmartPassiveIncome.com/convertkit, there’s no reason not to, if you don’t have an email list, there’s no reason not to start with something like ConvertKit because it gives you the most free email subscribers before you have to pay anything.

So 10,000 email subscribers, that is absolutely wild. But what’s really cool is using the creator network in there. You might be able to grow a little bit faster than you might on other platforms. We still believe in the initial values we set for a company like working in public, defaulting to generosity, and teaching everything we know.

If anybody’s ever seen any of my live streams, you know that I wear shirts that say those things. Default to generosity, teach everything you know, create every day. These are all ConvertKit shirts. And their working in public one is interesting because they’re rebranding in public. They don’t have a new logo or website.

They want you to be a part of it, which again, I think is amazing. So anyway, you can go to their FAQ if you want to learn a little bit more. And I think the video from Nathan is really great. I also love their FAQ on this page too. The page might not exist in the future because it was freshly announced.

So as soon as you go to ConvertKit.com, it says soon to be Kit. Click here for more information. And that’s where I’m reading right now, but they have an FAQ. And I’m just going to read these questions to you. I’m not going to read you the answers, but again, from the perspective of, Hey, this is a brand.

You have a brand as well. You’re making a change, getting in front of people before they start making up answers. Getting into their heads to figure out what questions are being asked or they might be thinking about and then addressing them is so smart. Why are you changing your name and why Kit? I love the fact that it’s one word that is crazy and easy to spell.

Seva was not great. Didn’t you try to change your name once before? Why will this time be different? I love that they addressed this as well because this is for anybody who might remember the name changed from before. It was an absolute miss. I mean it wasn’t a disaster because it came back and came back strong but it was not good.

So the fact that they are saying, Hey, yeah, we messed up before that was in 2018 and you can read more about it there too, if you want, what’s changing in the product, why don’t you have a new logo? We already talked about that. When should I start calling you Kit? So it says we officially become Kit in September.

So they’re giving people a few months to get used to it, rolling out the name slowly, not just changing it overnight, which I think is smart. And again, whenever you’re making a big change like this, I think it’s smart to give people fair warning. Not everybody loves change. There’s not a lot of people, I mean, there are people who are upset about this change.

But that’s just going to be natural, but there’s so many people who are also very excited and, you know, anxious to learn more about what’s going to happen next and how this changes things and the positive, are you still focused on creators? Does this change how I log into my account? What will change as a part of the rebrand?

Will my subscription price go up? What does this mean for affiliates? So all great questions that are being answered right there on that page. So kudos to ConvertKit. I love the idea of doing something like this in public. Is that something I think everybody should do? No. ConvertKit I think is, is the right company to do something like this.

This is going to be a big lesson for a lot of other creators and brands, and it doesn’t guarantee that it’s going to go well. By the way, I think it’s set up to do well, but it’s about the execution. But if there’s one team that I know that can do it, maybe I’m biased because I’m kind of part of this team as an advisor, but I also have a close relationship with the team and I know what they’re capable of.

Everybody from the designers on the team to Nathan and everybody in between engineers, they’re just, they’re really smart. So we’ll see how this goes. I’ll be following along. I’m sure you’ll be following along as well, whether you again are a Kit user or not. And again, if you want to go through our link to just give us credit for the free subscription that you can get up to 10,000 subscribers, head on over to SmartPassiveIncome.com/convertkit. And that’ll probably end up being smartpassiveincome.com/kit as well in the future, actually, but it’ll redirect either way. That’s the beauty of Pretty Links that we use on our WordPress website. Anyway, SmartPassiveIncome.com/convertkit or smartpassiveincome.com/kit.

Go and get your free plan. And thank you so much for listening in on these thoughts and congrats again to the ConvertKit team. Super exciting. Super stoked to kind of follow along. Keep up the good work. Not just ConvertKit. It’s going to take a while for me to stop saying ConvertKit, in fact, so I’m glad we have till September.

Anyway, keep up the good work on your end, and I’ll talk to you soon.

Thank you so much for listening to the Smart Passive Income podcast at SmartPassiveIncome.com. I’m your host, Pat Flynn. Sound editing by Duncan Brown. Our senior producer is David Grabowski, and our executive producer is Matt Gartland. The Smart Passive Income Podcast is a production of SPI Media, and a proud member of the Entrepreneur Podcast Network. Catch you next week!