As a firm owner for over a years, I rely on software application and automation to improve operations and supply results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene few years back, it most definitely caught my attention When Did GoHighLevel Come Out.
The concept was enticing– an all-in-one client monitoring system with marketing, sales, and solution tools incorporated together. As an entrepreneur always wanting to streamline and scale my service, it appeared like a desire happened theoretically. Who wouldn’t desire a single solution that does it all?
However in this in-depth GoHighLevel testimonial, I’ll take you inside my disastrous journey of attempting (and falling short) to switch to this prominent brand-new software program. You’ll learn:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your own company needs, hopefully you can gain from my uncomfortable errors and inflated expectations.
Spoiler: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, begin with this list of finest CRMs instead. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re trying to find a sales, marketing, and job administration alternative to GoHighLevel, then here are a couple of we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Switching Over from Keap
To recognize what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you need context regarding my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had been gladly counting on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my customer management and automation demands.
I discovered Keap intuitive to use and it dealt with everything I needed– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, subscription websites, and customer assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are created to help local business maintain their customers while adding brand-new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with emails and messages, ensuring leads and customers obtain the ideal messages at the correct time. Use web site and social networks forms to streamline lead follow-up, and manage your development with simple consultation organizing and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated pricing estimate, invoicing, and settlement processing, freeing up your time. With Keap, local business can save 10 hours each week and rise income by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no credit card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap provides an extensive consumer relationship monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation solution customized for small businesses and business owners. We value Keap’s focus on enhancing sales procedures and nurturing customer connections through effective automation devices. The platform’s all-in-one strategy combines CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task management, making it especially attractive for companies seeking to combine their tech stack.
Generally, it just functioned accurately with very little fuss or maintenance needed. My open and click-through prices were wonderful (like 35% great). Automations ran smoothly without any problems.
So why on earth was I lured to uproot my entire operational foundation from a system that worked to attempt something unverified and untried?
In knowledge I can confess I got seduced by the alarm telephone call of “shiny object disorder”. You recognize the feeling: when everyone’s talking about a brand-new tool that will certainly change your organization … The yard usually looks greener beyond, and I questioned whether GoHighLevel could lower friction factors that I would certainly learned to endure throughout the years with Keap.
I resisted at first, but a few more aggravations led me to believe possibly it was time for a modification.
The Investment: Migrating My Agency to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I decided to take the plunge. I registered for HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, investing substantially more than the $97/month starter price.
This had not been a decision I took lightly. I recognized switching over platforms was going to need migrating all my Keap data and basically reconstructing my whole tech framework from the ground up using all of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Here’s an introduction of just several of the initiative called for:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ email subscriber documents
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Relocating client accounts, notes, and job information to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Setting up landing pages, coupons, and sales funnels around once more
- Learning a totally foreign UX and interface design
Done in, I invested around 30-40 tedious hours of arrangement work transitioning every little thing over– not to mention taking care of shed productivity throughout the button.
Yet eventually, it was a computed financial investment I was willing to make. I figured some short-term pain would repay with GoHighLevel giving a far better lasting option for my organization, Dripify. Oh just how incorrect I was …
It only took me about a month of hands-on usage to understand I had made a big mistake. The problems began piling up rapidly, until it reached a point I had to reduce my losses and switch back to Keap totally.
Let’s go through the nightmarish issues I ran into.
Protection Issues & Several Bugs
Provided GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I made sure 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 customers, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending event pointers, taking care of subscription expirations and a lot more.
Every little thing seemed to be operating fine … up until instantly it had not been. One morning, I awoke to locate 171 completely unnecessary e-mails had actually been sent to individuals who need to NOT have gotten them. This happened three days in a row, with a various set of 160 people each day.
I frantically attempted troubleshooting and restoring the automation from square one. But the issue continued.
When I desperately connected to their assistance group, they vaguely declared “web server concerns” were to blame. Yet this explanation didn’t make any kind of sense, given that the errors continued happening each morning like clockwork unassociated to any downtime.
In my mind, this large failing was completely inappropriate and simply really did not benefit my business. I have countless get in touches with relying upon my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be entirely unstable, just how could I leave mission-critical workflows and sensitive client data to their modern technology?
The unintuitive user interface just intensified these concerns …
Discouraging UX
Originating from Keap where whatever was seamless and user-friendly, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt steep and complex.
Straightforward jobs like modifying workflows included excavating through food selection systems that were all over the place. Key settings were unexplainably scattered in completely various sections. Moving in between functions felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll inform you what I suggest by talking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 separate setups panels to manage total, specific, and item arrangements. Yet for some crazy factor, the web links to accessibility each of these core setups were spread out on contrary sides of the screen. What!?
As a person that values clean, thoughtful design, this seriously frustrated me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress as opposed to a sleek product ready for prime-time usage. Their top priorities appeared focused on cramming in every feature under the sun, with bad functionality as a second thought.
And talking features, I quickly recognized the low cost tag featured expensive concessions …
Misleading Pricing When Did GoHighLevel Come Out
Among GoHighLevel’s largest marketing points is the economical price for access to numerous features. Yet I quickly learned this inexpensive base expense was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with erratic fees for core performance. Unexpectedly my bank card declarations had vague $10 fees from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it ended up, you get charged whenever you send an email via their web servers. So for high quantity individuals, this added up to hundreds of dollars in unanticipated costs.
In between these per-email fees and paying extra for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “budget-friendly” GoHighLevel membership wound up costing significantly MORE than my Keap plan.
The reduced sticker price was appealing, however simply not realistic in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor taste in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my carefully supported e-mail open prices drop practically overnight after changing to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my audience engagement consistently hit 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. Once I moved their records over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked instantaneously to a pitiful 9% open price.
Despite just how much I maximized my sending techniques or attempted every repairing trick, I can barely push open prices back into the teens– still a 50%+ decline from my previous standards When Did GoHighLevel Come Out.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and e-mails suddenly had horrible involvement. The only point I can believe that would be creating this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so based on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the crippling deliverability concerns, hidden charges, busted features, and horrible interface, I had finally reached my restriction …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after moving my company to GoHighLevel, I understood I had actually made a substantial blunder. The cons drastically outweighed any advantages.
No software is perfect, yet the large quantity of problems was beyond appropriate.
At the end of the day, software program boils down to depend on. If I can not trust it to manage vital features capably or think a vendor has my best interests in mind, then it’s time to walk away– also after spending significant time, cash, and effort migrating.
So I made the tough contact us to turn around training course and return back to Keap entirely simply weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s explore what I gained from this debacle.
Key Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Error
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a pricey accident. But in hindsight, it showed me a couple of crucial lessons:
- Stick to what jobs. Don’t distress what’s functioning unless something is definitively much better across the board. Adjustment brings threat.
- Veterinarian claims thoroughly. Marketing hype around brand-new software program commonly covers larger underlying defects. Deep due diligence is important.
- Select simplicity over features. Well-designed devices must make your job life simpler, not much more complicated and unpleasant.
- Transparency develops trust fund. Opaque pricing, unethical reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade issues destroys depend on.
- Seek honest reviews. Pleased assistance reviews indicate much less if too much issues suggest poor general functionality.
- Excellence is impossible. No single service can flawlessly meet every special organization requirement. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over revolution. Incremental improvements commonly exceed risky wholesale reinvention of what already works penalty.
In other words, I discovered to be much more unconvinced of “as well great to be real” marketing cases and less tempted by the appeal of glossy brand-new things. The tools you make use of daily must earn count on with openness and performance, not glossy advertising.