Why ConvertKit exists & the latest product announcements
At it’s core, ConvertKit exists to help bloggers earn a living. And by bloggers I mean online creators, podcasts, vloggers, authors, etc. We want to help these online creators understand that finances don’t have cause stress and that it’s possible to earn a living doing something they love. But that’s only half of it.
The other side of it comes down to this: When was the last time you read something online that actually changed you? Not just an interesting article, but something that meaningfully improved your life? We want to help our customers creating valuable content like this that changes their reader’s lives.
Hear more about our mission at ConvertKit and what we’ve got coming up by watching my keynote from our Craft + Commerce conference earlier this year.
Some ConvertKit stats.
If you look at our typical customer, you’ll see both these sides. They are not only able to earn a living by teaching, writing, and creating online, they are also able to actually help people change their life. And we get to support them as they’re earning a living by helping others and basically changing the world.
At this point, ConvertKit is a team of 25 people. Our mission is to support our now 14,000 customers. Those 14,000 customers have 70 million unique subscribers. Those 70 million subscribers have the opportunity to learn new skills and level up their life because of these 14,000 creators.
Over the last 4 ½ years we’ve delivered over 2.3 billion emails. We see that as 2.3 billion opportunities for people to experience a piece of content that can meaningfully improve their life.
How do we actually support bloggers?
At ConvertKit we’re supporting our bloggers in three main areas- Training, Tools, and Support.
Training-
Tradecraft- We’ve been trying something new with our Tradecraft publication. Instead of publishing a weekly blog post, we’ve changed to a monthly magazine style release that focuses on one particular topic. We’re covering all the topics you need to know in order to build an online business.
Product Creation Masterclass- We needed a way to take these ideas and implement them in practice. Our first Masterclass included 14,000 bloggers and helped them create a product, start to finish, in 30 days. We’ll be running this Masterclass multiple times over the next year.
Tools-
This is the core of our business. Over the last six months we’ve been working on something very special. We began to think about what ConvertKit would look like if we reimagined it from the ground up.
I’ve always built ConvertKit to be and have the elements that I wanted as a blogger. So we looked at all the products out there to see what’s being done and find ways to build on them. It’s not reinventing the wheel, instead we felt like we were building on the shoulders of the giants before us.
We knew ConvertKit need to be a lot more powerful. We needed high-end functionality to enable our large customers to use the product, but we also knew couldn’t move away from what we’re most known for- ease of use. We had to be both- more advanced AND even easier for the beginner than we are today.
To do this, we’re rolling out visual automations.
Watch my full demo of our visual automations from the conference in the video up top starting at minute 8:45 in the video. Of if you just want the quick details, here are the main points:
Automations
We’re working hard to release a visual automations editor that will allow you do everything you can already with rules, but in a much more organized and efficient manner. We’re linking all of the elements of your ConvertKit account, in one place.
Link a form, tag, and sequence with a basic automation
Edit Sequences and Forms inline
Create multiple paths, based on subscriber events
Use conditions to check Tags and Custom Fields
Three important takeaways
- You can now see the subscribers entire journey at a glance.
- It works the way you expect it to (click a form or a sequence to make changes right there)
- It’s insanely fast.
All of this will open for private beta on August 1st!
Tagging subscribers on a link click
When you add a link to a Broadcast or sequence email, you can choose (or create) a tag that will get added to any subscriber who clicks this link.
That means instead of going to Rules and creating an Automation Rule for this, you can do it super fast inline.
Integration with Instapage (coming August 1st).
We firmly believe in building the absolute best tools and experiences in the industry. When that’s not possible in a particular area we want to integrate with the best.
Support-
We want to level up the support experience. We know that when you’re trying to get something done and you have to wait an hour or more for your questions to be answered it’s not a great experience. To fix that we’ve rolled out Live Chat. Now you can get the help you want instantly.
Live chat
Currently live chat working hours are from 7am-6pm, Pacific. You can get your questions answered on the spot by clicking the blue button at the bottom right corner of the app today.
Are you blogging?
Those three areas are how we’re implementing our mission to help you earn a living from your blog. We believe that through blogging you can earn that living, see that freedom to do the things you want to do- travel, have free time, be with your family, and live where you want.
If you’re not a blogger now, why not? If you become a blogger, you’ll not only change your world, you just might change someone else’s as well.
