As a firm owner for over a decade, I rely on software and automation to simplify procedures and provide results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene few years back, it absolutely captured my focus GoHighLevel For Startups.
The idea was attractive– an all-in-one customer monitoring platform with marketing, sales, and service devices integrated with each other. As a business owner always looking to simplify and scale my company, it felt like a desire come true theoretically. That wouldn’t want a solitary option that does it all?
But in this comprehensive GoHighLevel testimonial, I’ll take you inside my devastating journey of trying (and stopping working) to change to this popular new software application. You’ll learn:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your own company demands, ideally you can gain from my excruciating errors and blew up expectations.
Looter: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, start with this listing of finest CRMs rather. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re seeking a sales, marketing, and task management alternative to GoHighLevel, then here are a couple of we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Considered Switching Over from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you need context regarding my previous setup. For over 5 years I had been gladly relying upon Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to meet all my client monitoring and automation needs.
I found Keap user-friendly to make use of and it took care of whatever I required– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, subscription sites, and customer assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are developed to assist small businesses maintain their clients while including new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and texts, guaranteeing leads and customers receive the right messages at the correct time. Use web site and social media sites kinds to streamline lead follow-up, and manage your growth with easy visit organizing and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated pricing estimate, invoicing, and payment processing, liberating your time. With Keap, small companies can save 10 hours weekly and increase profits by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no charge card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap provides an extensive consumer relationship monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation solution tailored for small companies and business owners. We appreciate Keap’s focus on enhancing sales processes and nurturing consumer connections through powerful automation tools. The system’s all-in-one technique combines CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task administration, making it especially appealing for companies aiming to combine their technology pile.
Generally, it simply functioned reliably with marginal difficulty or upkeep needed. My open and click-through rates were excellent (like 35% terrific). Automations ran efficiently without any problems.
So why in the world was I lured to uproot my entire operational foundation from a system that functioned to try something unverified and untried?
In hindsight I can confess I obtained attracted by the siren telephone call of “glossy item syndrome”. You understand the sensation: when everyone’s speaking about a brand-new tool that will revolutionize your organization … The turf usually looks greener on the other side, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel may decrease friction factors that I ‘d discovered to endure throughout the years with Keap.
I stood up to at first, however a few more irritations led me to think perhaps it was time for an adjustment.
The Financial investment: Migrating My Agency to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I decided to start. I registered for HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, spending substantially more than the $97/month starter price.
This had not been a choice I took lightly. I understood switching over platforms was going to require migrating all my Keap data and essentially rebuilding my whole technology infrastructure from scratch utilizing every one of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Below’s an introduction of simply a few of the initiative required:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ e-mail customer records
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Moving client profiles, notes, and job information to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Establishing landing pages, discounts, and sales funnels around again
- Learning an entirely international UX and user interface style
All in, I invested around 30-40 tedious hours of setup job transitioning every little thing over– and also handling shed performance throughout the button.
Yet ultimately, it was a calculated financial investment I agreed to make. I figured some temporary pain would repay with GoHighLevel providing a better lasting option for my organization, Dripify. Oh how incorrect I was …
It only took me regarding a month of hands-on usage to recognize I had made a large error. The concerns started accumulating swiftly, till it got to a factor I needed to cut my losses and change back to Keap completely.
Allow’s go through the nightmarish issues I encountered.
Security Issues & Lots of Vermin
Given GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation system, I took care to thoroughly recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of sequences for onboarding brand-new email subscribers, onboarding new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending out occasion reminders, taking care of subscription expiries and much more.
Whatever seemed to be operating fine … till unexpectedly it wasn’t. One early morning, I awoke to discover 171 totally unnecessary emails had actually been sent to customers who must NOT have gotten them. This happened 3 days in a row, with a different batch of 160 individuals daily.
I desperately attempted repairing and rebuilding the automation from scratch. Yet the trouble persisted.
When I seriously connected to their assistance team, they vaguely claimed “web server issues” were responsible. Yet this description didn’t make any kind of feeling, because the errors proceeded taking place each morning like clockwork unassociated to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this substantial failure was completely inappropriate and just really did not help my company. I have thousands of contacts relying on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be entirely unreliable, just how could I hand over mission-critical workflows and sensitive customer information to their technology?
The unintuitive interface only intensified these issues …
Aggravating UX
Coming from Keap where every little thing was smooth and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt steep and complicated.
Basic tasks like editing and enhancing workflows involved digging with food selection systems that were all over the place. Secret setups were unexplainably spread in completely different sections. Moving between features felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll inform you what I imply by discussing their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 separate setups panels to manage total, private, and item configurations. Yet for some insane reason, the web links to accessibility each of these core setups were spread out on opposite sides of the screen. What!?
As somebody who values clean, thoughtful style, this seriously annoyed me.
It strengthened that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress instead of a refined product prepared for prime-time usage. Their priorities seemed concentrated on cramming in every feature imaginable, with bad usability as an afterthought.
And speaking of features, I soon realized the low price tag included costly compromises …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel For Startups
One of GoHighLevel’s biggest marketing factors is the economical cost for access to a lot of features. But I swiftly discovered this inexpensive base cost was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with erratic fees for core performance. Instantly my credit card declarations had unclear $10 costs from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it turned out, you obtain charged whenever you send out an email via their web servers. So for high quantity users, this added up to thousands of dollars in unexpected costs.
In between these per-email costs and paying additional for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “budget friendly” GoHighLevel subscription wound up setting you back dramatically greater than my Keap plan.
The reduced price tag was appealing, yet just not reasonable in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative taste in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my thoroughly nurtured e-mail open prices drop almost overnight after changing to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my target market involvement constantly hit 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. Once I migrated their documents over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked instantaneously to a pathetic 9% open price.
Regardless of just how much I optimized my sending out practices or tried every fixing method, I could hardly nudge open prices back into the teens– still a 50%+ decline from my previous criteria GoHighLevel For Startups.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and emails instantly had awful interaction. The only point I might think that would be causing this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For an agency so dependent on email marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the crippling deliverability issues, concealed costs, busted features, and dreadful user interface, I had ultimately reached my restriction …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after moving my company to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had made a substantial mistake. The disadvantages dramatically outweighed any type of advantages.
No software is ideal, but the large quantity of problems was past acceptable.
At the end of the day, software comes down to trust. If I can not trust it to take care of essential features capably or think a vendor has my benefits in mind, after that it’s time to walk away– also after investing considerable time, money, and initiative migrating.
So I made the tough contact us to reverse course and return back to Keap completely just weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Let’s discover what I gained from this ordeal.
Trick Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a costly accident. However in hindsight, it taught me a few vital lessons:
- Stick to what works. Don’t disturb what’s working unless something is definitively far better across the board. Adjustment brings danger.
- Veterinarian claims extensively. Marketing hype around brand-new software often obscures bigger underlying problems. Deep due diligence is essential.
- Pick simplicity over features. Well-designed devices should make your job life less complicated, not much more complex and unpleasant.
- Openness develops count on. Nontransparent pricing, dubious reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape issues ruins depend on.
- Look for objective reviews. Delighted assistance assesses suggest much less if excessive issues suggest poor total use.
- Excellence is impossible. No single solution can completely fulfill every special business demand. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over change. Incremental enhancements generally exceed high-risk wholesale reinvention of what currently functions penalty.
Basically, I learned to be much more skeptical of “also excellent to be true” marketing insurance claims and much less tempted by the appeal of shiny brand-new objects. The tools you make use of daily ought to gain depend on via transparency and efficiency, not slick advertising.