As a company proprietor for over a years, I rely upon software and automation to simplify operations and supply results. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene couple of years back, it absolutely caught my focus Is GoHighLevel a Pyramid Scheme.
The idea was attractive– an all-in-one customer management platform with marketing, sales, and service tools integrated with each other. As an entrepreneur always aiming to simplify and scale my service, it appeared like a desire come to life on paper. Who wouldn’t desire a single solution that does it all?
However in this thorough GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my devastating trip of trying (and stopping working) to switch over to this prominent new software program. You’ll discover:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your own organization requirements, hopefully you can pick up from my agonizing mistakes and pumped up expectations.
Looter: I do NOT advise GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, start with this list of finest CRMs rather. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re trying to find a sales, marketing, and project monitoring option to GoHighLevel, then below are a couple of we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Switching from Keap
To recognize what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you need context about my previous setup. For over 5 years I had been gladly depending on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to meet all my customer management and automation demands.
I located Keap user-friendly to utilize and it handled whatever I required– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and client support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are made to aid local business maintain their customers while adding new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with emails and texts, ensuring leads and clients get the appropriate messages at the right time. Usage site and social media sites forms to enhance lead follow-up, and handle your development with simple appointment organizing and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and repayment handling, freeing up your time. With Keap, local business can save 10 hours weekly and rise revenue by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no charge card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap provides a detailed consumer connection monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation remedy customized for local business and business owners. We appreciate Keap’s focus on simplifying sales processes and nurturing customer partnerships via powerful automation tools. The platform’s all-in-one method combines CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task administration, making it particularly eye-catching for companies looking to combine their technology pile.
For the most part, it just functioned dependably with marginal difficulty or maintenance called for. My open and click-through rates were terrific (like 35% excellent). Automations ran smoothly without concerns.
So why on earth was I attracted to uproot my entire functional foundation from a system that worked to attempt something unproven and untested?
In hindsight I can confess I obtained attracted by the alarm call of “shiny things syndrome”. You recognize the sensation: when everyone’s speaking about a new device that will transform your service … The lawn usually looks greener beyond, and I questioned whether GoHighLevel may minimize rubbing factors that I ‘d discovered to endure over the years with Keap.
I stood up to at first, however a couple of even more disappointments led me to assume possibly it was time for a change.
The Investment: Migrating My Firm to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I chose to start. I signed up for HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, investing substantially greater than the $97/month starter price.
This had not been a choice I ignored. I knew switching over platforms was going to require migrating all my Keap information and basically rebuilding my entire tech framework from the ground up using every one of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Right here’s an overview of simply some of the effort required:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ email client records
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Moving customer accounts, notes, and project data to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Setting up landing pages, promotions, and sales funnels all over once again
- Learning an entirely international UX and user interface layout
All in, I invested around 30-40 tedious hours of configuration job transitioning whatever over– not to mention dealing with lost productivity throughout the switch.
But inevitably, it was a computed investment I agreed to make. I figured some short-term pain would certainly settle with GoHighLevel supplying a better lasting service for my business, Dripify. Oh exactly how incorrect I was …
It only took me about a month of hands-on usage to recognize I had actually made a big blunder. The issues started piling up rapidly, up until it reached a factor I needed to reduce my losses and switch over back to Keap totally.
Let’s go through the horrible problems I ran into.
Protection Issues & Numerous Bugs
Provided GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I made sure to diligently recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included sequences for onboarding new email customers, onboarding new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending occasion tips, handling membership expiries and far more.
Every little thing appeared to be working penalty … till unexpectedly it had not been. One early morning, I woke up to find 171 completely pointless emails had been sent to individuals who must NOT have obtained them. This occurred 3 days in a row, with a various batch of 160 people each day.
I hysterically attempted troubleshooting and restoring the automation from the ground up. Yet the trouble continued.
When I desperately connected to their support group, they slightly asserted “web server problems” were responsible. But this explanation really did not make any type of feeling, because the mistakes proceeded taking place each early morning like clockwork unconnected to any type of downtime.
In my mind, this massive failure was totally undesirable and simply didn’t work for my service. I have countless get in touches with depending on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be totally unreliable, just how could I entrust mission-critical workflows and delicate customer data to their modern technology?
The unintuitive interface only intensified these issues …
Discouraging UX
Originating from Keap where everything was seamless and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning contour felt high and challenging.
Straightforward tasks like editing and enhancing workflows involved excavating via menu systems that were all over the place. Trick settings were unexplainably spread in entirely various areas. Moving in between features really felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll tell you what I mean by discussing their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 separate setups panels to take care of overall, individual, and item configurations. Yet for some crazy factor, the links to access each of these core setups were spread out on contrary sides of the screen. What!?
As somebody that values clean, thoughtful design, this seriously annoyed me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress rather than a refined item prepared for prime-time usage. Their priorities appeared focused on cramming in every feature under the sun, with poor use as a second thought.
And speaking of features, I soon realized the low price tag featured pricey concessions …
Misleading Pricing Is GoHighLevel a Pyramid Scheme
Among GoHighLevel’s largest selling factors is the economical cost for access to many features. However I promptly learned this cheap base expense was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with sporadic fees for core functionality. All of a sudden my bank card declarations had unclear $10 fees from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it ended up, you get billed each time you send an e-mail with their web servers. So for high quantity customers, this added up to hundreds of dollars in unanticipated costs.
Between these per-email costs and paying additional for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “inexpensive” GoHighLevel registration wound up costing significantly MORE than my Keap plan.
The reduced price tag was appealing, however simply not realistic in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor preference in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my thoroughly supported e-mail open rates plunge nearly over night after switching over to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my audience involvement consistently hit 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. Once I migrated their records over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked instantaneously to a pathetic 9% open price.
No matter how much I enhanced my sending out practices or attempted every fixing method, I can hardly push open rates back right into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decline from my previous benchmarks Is GoHighLevel a Pyramid Scheme.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and emails unexpectedly had terrible involvement. The only thing I can assume that would certainly be creating this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a firm so based on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the crippling deliverability concerns, concealed charges, damaged features, and terrible interface, I had lastly reached my limitation …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after moving my agency to GoHighLevel, I knew I had actually made a big blunder. The cons significantly exceeded any type of advantages.
No software application is perfect, but the large quantity of troubles was past acceptable.
At the end of the day, software comes down to count on. If I can not trust it to manage important features properly or believe a supplier has my best interests in mind, then it’s time to walk away– also after spending significant time, cash, and initiative moving.
So I made the tough phone call to turn around course and return back to Keap completely simply weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Let’s explore what I learned from this ordeal.
Trick Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as an expensive ill fortune. However in hindsight, it educated me a couple of crucial lessons:
- Stick to what works. Don’t upset what’s working unless something is definitively far better across the board. Modification brings danger.
- Veterinarian asserts completely. Marketing buzz around new software program typically obscures larger underlying defects. Deep due diligence is necessary.
- Select simplicity over features. Properly designed tools ought to make your work life simpler, not a lot more complicated and untidy.
- Transparency builds trust. Opaque pricing, questionable reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade issues destroys trust.
- Seek objective evaluations. Satisfied support examines mean less if excessive issues imply inadequate overall usability.
- Excellence is impossible. No single option can perfectly meet every unique organization need. Find the least-bad fit.
- Development over change. Step-by-step improvements generally exceed dangerous wholesale reinvention of what currently functions fine.
In other words, I discovered to be extra hesitant of “as well good to be true” marketing claims and much less lured by the attraction of shiny brand-new things. The tools you make use of daily must earn depend on via transparency and performance, not glossy advertising.