As an agency proprietor for over a decade, I rely on software program and automation to improve procedures and supply outcomes. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene couple of years back, it definitely captured my interest When Was GoHighLevel Founded.
The concept was enticing– an all-in-one client management system with marketing, sales, and service tools integrated with each other. As an entrepreneur constantly aiming to streamline and scale my company, it appeared like a desire become a reality on paper. That wouldn’t desire a solitary service that does it all?
Yet in this comprehensive GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my dreadful journey of attempting (and stopping working) to switch over to this preferred brand-new software application. You’ll discover:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own business requirements, ideally you can gain from my uncomfortable mistakes and blew up assumptions.
Spoiler: I do NOT recommend GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, begin with this listing of finest CRMs instead. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re trying to find a sales, marketing, and task management choice to GoHighLevel, then here are a few we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Thought About Changing from Keap
To recognize what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you need context regarding my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had actually been happily relying upon Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my customer administration and automation needs.
I discovered Keap user-friendly to use and it handled every little thing I needed– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and client assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are made to help local business maintain their clients while adding new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with emails and texts, guaranteeing leads and clients get the best messages at the correct time. Use website and social networks types to enhance lead follow-up, and handle your development with very easy appointment organizing and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated pricing quote, invoicing, and payment handling, freeing up your time. With Keap, small businesses can save 10 hours weekly and increase earnings by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no credit card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap offers a thorough consumer relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation remedy tailored for small businesses and business owners. We value Keap’s focus on simplifying sales processes and supporting customer relationships via powerful automation tools. The system’s all-in-one strategy combines CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and job management, making it especially appealing for businesses aiming to consolidate their tech stack.
For the most part, it just worked reliably with minimal fuss or upkeep required. My open and click-through prices were wonderful (like 35% wonderful). Automations ran smoothly with no issues.
So why on earth was I lured to uproot my whole operational foundation from a system that worked to attempt something unverified and untested?
In knowledge I can confess I got attracted by the alarm phone call of “shiny object syndrome”. You know the sensation: when everyone’s speaking about a brand-new device that will certainly reinvent your company … The turf typically looks greener on the other side, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel might lower friction factors that I ‘d learned to tolerate for many years with Keap.
I stood up to in the beginning, however a couple of even more frustrations led me to believe maybe it was time for a change.
The Financial investment: Migrating My Agency to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I made a decision to take the plunge. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, spending dramatically greater than the $97/month starter cost.
This wasn’t a decision I took lightly. I knew switching systems was going to require moving all my Keap data and basically reconstructing my entire tech infrastructure from scratch using all of the GoHighLevel integrations offered.
Below’s a review of simply some of the initiative called for:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ e-mail subscriber records
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Relocating customer accounts, notes, and project data to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Establishing landing pages, promos, and sales funnels all over again
- Learning an entirely foreign UX and user interface style
All in, I spent around 30-40 laborious hours of setup job transitioning everything over– as well as dealing with lost performance during the button.
However ultimately, it was a calculated financial investment I agreed to make. I figured some temporary discomfort would settle with GoHighLevel offering a far better long-lasting solution for my business, Dripify. Oh how wrong I was …
It only took me about a month of hands-on use to realize I had actually made a big error. The concerns began accumulating promptly, until it got to a point I had to cut my losses and change back to Keap entirely.
Allow’s go through the nightmarish troubles I experienced.
Protection Issues & Numerous Bugs
Provided GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation system, I made sure to carefully recreate every workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of sequences for onboarding new email customers, onboarding new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending out event tips, managing membership expiries and much more.
Everything seemed to be functioning penalty … up until all of a sudden it wasn’t. One morning, I woke up to locate 171 totally irrelevant e-mails had been sent to users that need to NOT have obtained them. This took place three days in a row, with a various batch of 160 individuals daily.
I hysterically attempted troubleshooting and reconstructing the automation from the ground up. But the problem lingered.
When I seriously connected to their assistance group, they slightly asserted “web server issues” were at fault. Yet this explanation really did not make any feeling, considering that the errors proceeded occurring each early morning like clockwork unconnected to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this enormous failing was entirely unacceptable and just didn’t work for my business. I have thousands of contacts depending on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be totally unreliable, just how could I delegate mission-critical workflows and delicate client data to their technology?
The unintuitive user interface only intensified these problems …
Aggravating UX
Coming from Keap where every little thing was seamless and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve really felt high and complex.
Basic tasks like modifying workflows included excavating via menu systems that were all over the place. Key setups were unexplainably scattered in entirely different sections. Relocating in between functions really felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll inform you what I mean by talking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 different settings panels to take care of total, specific, and item configurations. Yet for some crazy reason, the links to access each of these core settings were spread out on opposite sides of the screen. What!?
As somebody that values clean, thoughtful design, this seriously irritated me.
It strengthened that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress rather than a polished item ready for prime-time use. Their priorities seemed concentrated on packing in every feature under the sun, with bad functionality as an afterthought.
And speaking of features, I soon realized the low price tag came with costly compromises …
Misleading Pricing When Was GoHighLevel Founded
Among GoHighLevel’s greatest selling points is the economical price for access to a lot of features. However I rapidly discovered this inexpensive base price was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with occasional fees for core performance. Instantly my credit card statements had vague $10 costs from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it turned out, you get charged every time you send out an email via their servers. So for high quantity customers, this amounted to numerous bucks in unexpected costs.
Between these per-email fees and paying additional for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “economical” GoHighLevel registration ended up costing substantially greater than my Keap plan.
The low sticker price was appealing, however simply not reasonable in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative preference in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my carefully nurtured email open rates plummet nearly over night after changing to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my audience interaction regularly hit 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. But once I moved their records over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked promptly to a pathetic 9% open price.
Regardless of just how much I maximized my sending out practices or tried every troubleshooting technique, I could hardly push open prices back right into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous criteria When Was GoHighLevel Founded.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and emails suddenly had dreadful involvement. The only point I might assume that would certainly be causing this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so dependent on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the debilitating deliverability problems, concealed costs, damaged features, and awful interface, I had finally reached my restriction …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after migrating my company to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had actually made a significant error. The disadvantages significantly outweighed any advantages.
No software application is ideal, yet the large volume of issues was past appropriate.
At the end of the day, software boils down to depend on. If I can’t trust it to deal with essential functions effectively or think a supplier has my benefits in mind, then it’s time to leave– even after investing considerable time, money, and effort moving.
So I made the difficult contact us to turn around program and return back to Keap entirely simply weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Let’s explore what I gained from this fiasco.
Trick Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Error
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a pricey accident. Yet in hindsight, it taught me a few essential lessons:
- Stay with what jobs. Don’t disturb what’s functioning unless something is definitively better across the board. Change brings threat.
- Vet asserts completely. Marketing buzz around new software often covers bigger underlying defects. Deep due persistance is necessary.
- Pick simplicity over features. Properly designed tools must make your job life easier, not much more complicated and untidy.
- Transparency develops depend on. Opaque pricing, unethical reseller terms, and finger-pointing to avert problems ruins trust fund.
- Look for objective testimonials. Pleased assistance examines suggest much less if excessive problems indicate poor total functionality.
- Perfection is impossible. No single option can perfectly satisfy every distinct organization need. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Development over change. Step-by-step improvements usually exceed dangerous wholesale reinvention of what currently works fine.
In other words, I learned to be a lot more hesitant of “also excellent to be real” marketing cases and much less attracted by the allure of shiny brand-new objects. The devices you use daily ought to make depend on with transparency and efficiency, not glossy advertising.