Course Creation in Under an Hour? David Zenler Shows Us How

Lyric Kinard (00:01.422) Hello friends, it's so good to be with you again and I am so pleased to welcome David Zunler from the new Zunler online course platform. Welcome and why don't you just quickly introduce yourself and tell you who you are and how you got to be where you are right now with the company you're with. David Zenler (00:22.58) Yeah, thank you very much Lyric. So I work for Zennler. Zennler is an all-in-one platform. We say it's the course creator's toolbox because it contains everything. Now I'm one of the educators with Zennler and I've been with Zennler for about five years now, but I've actually been on Zennler for a lot longer. So I know the platform inside out and then the CEO kind of invited me to come in and be part of the Zennler team. I'd always helped on the Facebook group and things like this, but I really thought this is a great opportunity to be part of something that is really great. And that's how I got where I am. My actual background is all website design, tech, design work, creative sector. I've worked for, uh, M.O.D. I've worked for British Airways, Google, uh, Disney. I've done pretty much everything in creative field. and I also have run my own companies as well and I still do and some of my companies, some of the companies I run or the side projects I run are on Zendler itself. So I've been through all the main platforms and I've chosen Zendler because in my opinion is the best. Lyric Kinard (01:36.738) What are a couple of the specific things you think Sendler does better or differently than any of the other platforms you've personally tried? David Zenler (01:47.126) Yeah, I think the main thing with me as being part of the education team with I joined when Kevin joined, who's another one of the educators at Zennler. And we, our first job was to go in and make everything easier for people. So make the whole process of creating a site, a course, marketing, or as easy as possible, put it all in plain English. So anyone can come in and go. now I know how to market as well, because we realized that the biggest pain point was marketing. So that's the bit where every platform kind of lacks. They take you through how to learn how to use platform and all of these things. But actually the aftercare help of when you've got all that ready, I still haven't got people coming in. I still haven't made sales. So we realized that was a pinnacle point. And so we push a lot of marketing techniques. and even other software outside of the Zender. So once they've actually created their sites and everything else, we give them that hand holding to be able to generate those leads and those sales. And for me, that's the part that makes them the special. mean, I'm the education team, so I'm going to be talking all about the education, right? So I will tell you all about the platform, but from the education point of view, it's always been a place where we can directly connect with our audience. Lyric Kinard (03:05.248) Of course. David Zenler (03:14.892) We can help them straight away there. And then we, our community is absolutely amazing. I think it's the best community on the web. I really think because it's so positive, right? So everybody that comes in there, we don't let negative, we don't have bullying, trolling, any of this stuff. We don't have people come in and try and harvest people for work. We're very, very hot on that. And we try to help and inspire people in a positive way. So that is our main. ethos, the platform itself is, it is called the creators toolbox. It was called the all in one course platform, but we call it the course creators toolbox because what we try and do is allow you to, once you're into the platform and you're a paid member, you then have access to everything you need to run everything. And that includes like course, creating memberships, running your own lives. You don't need any extra subscriptions. Now we've got a full community in there. So like that circle or Facebook type community, you've got all that inside Zenla with live chat as well. You can even put blogs on there. You can create unlimited pages, unlimited courses, you you name it. You know, I can go on about all of the features, but it's all built into the platform with the main aim that you don't have to go outside the platform. So you pay your cost and you have access to everything you need. Lyric Kinard (04:42.112) Right. Sendler is one of the platforms that I personally use for my own courses as well and for the Academy's public website. And we have marketing funnels, we have email systems, have, you know, of course the courses and a full-on website. One of the things I love is that it can be extremely beginner friendly, but then leave room for people like me who like to control every little thing about every little part of the page and how it looks. But you can have, you can build a full website with menus and drop downs and pages with drag and drop blocks where you just plug in your own images or change every little bit of it again, like I said. Now, one of the things that you do a little bit differently that I haven't seen in a lot of the other platforms is you have Zoom integrated right into your platform. People don't have to purchase their own Zoom account outside of Zendler. Tell me how that came about because that's kind of unique. That's an interesting thing. David Zenler (05:54.828) Yeah, absolutely. It's this need from the CEO Rakesh who wanted that vision of you being in a platform that you don't have to pay costs outside of the platform. So we know that the biggest converter is lives, right? So you get people into a live, it's much easier to warm them up. They get to know you personally. They get to trust you and then they believe in your product. And some people, you know, they just, doesn't matter even if you're, you're, you're the best teacher in the world. If you're doing a live and you're connecting with your audience and you, and you feel that connection between you your audience coming. So lives are huge. So Zennler decided to go ahead and try to get it all working with partnering with Zoom. So what you get, which is What people don't realize is not just a zoom account. It's an enterprise level zoom account. So what does that mean? That means if you're on the pro plan, you can have up to 300 participants at the time. If you're on a premium, you can have 500 and you know this lyric anyway, right? So you can have up to, but you can have extended sessions as well. So you can have up to four hour sessions. Okay. So, and, and not only that, is you've got lots of different live types. So you've got live classes and you can put these straight into your courses. Okay. All of these are self-contained as well. You can actually market these as self-contained lives or you can integrate them into your courses. We got one-to-one bookings that came about from our users. We have a lot of coaches and consultants and they wanted to run one-to-one booking events. So we start one-to-one booking as well. It's not just one-to-one. You can still use one-to-one booking for 300 members, okay? So it's got all that advantage. You've got interactive lives. So that's like your standard Zoom session where you can have people share screens and all of this sort of stuff. You've got true webinars, which is something you have to buy extra with Zoom, okay? And it's a lot of money. So you've got that true webinar experience and you've got live streams as well. So you can stream into your Lyric Kinard (08:09.292) Right. David Zenler (08:16.238) Facebook group, Twitch, wherever you want to stream to you can do via RMTP. So it has all that built about it. But another thing on top of that is separate from including it in your courses. You can sell your lives so you can have paid lives as well. Course all full automation through it. You can design the pages up any way you like using the Zenla page builder. So yeah, that's how it came about. It was this vision of keeping everything in the one place. Lyric Kinard (08:46.142) It is hugely flexible and I mean I'd be surprised if any of us are using anywhere close to all of the features that are available in Zoom. One of the other in Zoom, in Zendler, two Z's all together. One of the other things that is unusual a little bit about Zendler is your ability to let the user decide whether they are going to turn on that tax and have you remit it. Here in the States, it's just incredibly confusing to think about collecting different taxes and remitting it to different countries. That's just an overwhelming amount of work for a solopreneur. And to have a platform that can do it all for you, I mean, that was it for me. David Zenler (09:45.538) Yeah, exactly. Like the global taxes and all of this sort of stuff is built into ZENLA. So you can decide whether you want to turn that on so that ZENLA pays that on your behalf if you've got that turn on activated to which, especially with America, because America's, it's big, right? There's so many states, there's so many different rules that go on, you know? So you can go in there and you can filter it all down to your state level and all this sort of stuff. Lyric Kinard (10:02.049) Mm-hmm. David Zenler (10:13.048) But yeah, that's all built in as well. Obviously that's a thing that's important that we address that. And we do, and things change all the time. like systems like Zenlo or any other platform, continually rules are changing on things like GDPR is a classic one. know, things change for these things all the time. So Zenlo as a platform has to try and stay on top of all of that and make sure that we are responding. And I think... That was one that was asked for Lyric by the users again, because that's something we haven't talked about, is the fact that Zeng Le makes all of its decisions based on the feedback from our current paid members, and even our free members. So we have a feedback site where you can put in your request. And if it's upvoted by the members, then it will come into effect. I won't be straight away, because we have lists of things to do, but it will come into effect. Have you been on there, Luke? Have you put something in there? Lyric Kinard (11:14.894) Things take time. Lyric Kinard (11:21.422) Yes, yes I have several times, a number of times. And I've been around this and I can't remember if it's like four or five years. But one of the things that has been really interesting, because I love watching the behind the scenes, how everything is made, how it goes on, how companies work. And that's one of the reasons we're in business support, right? Because this actually interests us. Zendler has made so many constant, constant changes, improvements, and upgrades, and it is always kind of a feedback loop between the users and the company. This is one of the platforms, and I think I've personally used five or six different platforms. It's my job, right, to know about a lot of the different platforms. This one has the most people friendly, we can talk to people. I mean, you're the whole face of Zellert basically, David. People on the Facebook group are always tagging you personally into all kinds of questions and then you go and answer and like that's not really heard of on a lot of the other platforms. Let's go ahead and talk about the For instance, the Facebook group and the education. This is, mean, one of the main reasons I'm on Sendler was getting the free account and then going into the Facebook group and asking a few questions, but seeing the lives that happen there and listening to, I think it was Aaron Buckeye who did a bunch of just free lives saying, hey, this platform is great. Here's how I use it. You know, the live. person-to-person education for the people using the platforms for their business is phenomenal. It's amazing. So tell us about, why don't you just tell us, well, we don't have enough time on the planet for you to tell us all the things you do for Sendler and the time you spent, but give us a little overview of. Lyric Kinard (13:44.586) If somebody comes into the platform and decides to use this for building their online teaching business, what can they expect in the way of education from somebody like you and from the company? David Zenler (13:58.37) Yeah, lovely. Thank you, Lurik. Yeah, was, yeah, it was, it was a, it's a big thing. We've been scaling up for five years and I know that me and Kevin's motto is like, always be better, you know? And Rakesh is like, the great thing about the CEO is he just says, look, just support our members. Whatever you have to do, whatever you need to do, just go ahead and do it. Don't really even ask me, just go ahead and do it. I trust you. You know, that's really refreshing because everyone's holding a pigeonhole. So what we do is when members come in now, they do get free demo. So they get a demo session with a live instructor. They go through that. I'm not part of the demo or the onboarding team. I just work on it. Although I have been because the lady's off. So I've been filling in for a stack of all trades. Yes, it is. It is. It's been, it's been for about a year now. We run this in. Okay. Lyric Kinard (14:44.984) This is a new thing, this is really cool. David Zenler (14:53.304) So we do all these things all the time. So you don't really hear about the demo on onboard. So when you come onto the platform for the first time, you get a demo. So you get demo of the platform, about 45 minutes. Then if you upgrade to pro, you also get an onboarding experience. That's one to one onboarding experience. Now that's outside of the education part. Cause as soon as someone comes in, they get resources to go and join our Facebook group, know, sign up on our tutorial site. So our tutorial site is a hub. where we have so much. Yeah. And Lyric, you know, it's not, it's not just on platform. It takes you from knowing the platform. So learning Zenla, which is a quick start guide, right? Inside of that is a four hour course, but actually work done for on the platform is two hours inside tent two hours. You can build a site and you can build your first course in two hours. And it's detailed. So from there inside the tutorial site, once you've built that, you can go into what we call the complete guide to Zendler. That's an encyclopedia and every part of the Zendler system we've tried to cover and you can cherry pick the bits you want. Now, once you've got all that together, you're going to need that final step. So you're obviously going to need to market. So we've got a whole section on marketing and I think there's about 20 different videos on SEO setting up your YouTube channel, right? Nothing to do with Zendler. like how to set up Google Analytics, do basic marketing, nothing to do with Zen, this is just helping you from that stage forward. And then outside of that, we've got things like being better on camera. So camera confidence, like how to set up your tech, like how to use things like OBS if you're using Zoom, how to use Zoom properly. So that's all the support on the tutorials hub. But inside the Facebook group, we also answer questions, which Lyric was saying. Lyric Kinard (16:22.84) Bye. David Zenler (16:44.35) and we run regular workshops. So we always run a minimum of two main workshops in a month. And we've been running mega series lately. So in a month we run like a series of 12, 13 lives. And we've done that for the last two months. And so we're scaling up. Every Thursday we have a live support desk with a member of the education team on for two hours. You can jump into those sessions and she will show you personally how to do things. We also have office hours each week, which tells you about what's going on in the company. And of course we have things like Zen pop-ups as well, where I might come on or Mammy or Kevin might jump on and just answer people's questions that have been asked in the group that are a bit too complicated to just write messages. So I'll come on and do it is much quicker. You know, if I'm writing a message about a technical question or something, or an education-based, it's a bit of a longer... question it's easier for me to shoot a video put it on there than it is to write like paragraphs of text so that's what we do for you we just try to cater for everybody Lyric Kinard (17:46.914) Right? Lyric Kinard (17:53.708) And I can absolutely confirm the last, I think the last two weeks I had questions. It's like a short, if somebody just shows me this yes or no thing and I hopped on live on Zoom, you'd find the link in the Facebook group and Manmeet was there and I said this, she said, share your screen and I showed her and she said this and it was solved. That was it. and I was talking to somebody else and they were like, I was worried if I got on there, there would be 300 people and I'd waste an hour and never get my question answered. I was like, nope, that's never happened, right? There are, right? David Zenler (18:34.456) I don't know if that would ever happen because we actually had it two days a week live, two hours, two days a week. We weren't getting enough people in. Obviously some, an educator doesn't want to be sitting there with nobody coming in. So we'd said one day a week and now it's getting busy again. We're going to open it back up to two hours. But I don't know anyone that sat there and waited too long to get the, you're in a queue obviously because you've got live people in with you. But you can jump out, hop back in again when it's less busy. Lyric Kinard (18:40.706) Mm-hmm. Lyric Kinard (18:47.255) Right. Lyric Kinard (19:00.717) Mm-hmm. David Zenler (19:04.75) So I don't know of anyone that's waited that could say I waited so long I had to go kind of thing. You know, you could you could ask you could put a thing in the chat saying, mommy, I've got to go. I haven't got enough time. Can you send me an email later to tell me? And she would be like, yeah, absolutely. Lyric Kinard (19:11.363) Bye. Lyric Kinard (19:21.262) All right, so the value of having an actual live face-to-face person to talk to in these days of it's so hard to find a person to talk to on the phone tree. You've spent an hour trying to get through and you all have done the exact opposite of that. It is phenomenal. Let's go down to a person who is Most of our listeners are educators already. They have been teaching people in person for a long time, but often the tech is kind of overwhelming, a little bit. I'm great, I know what I need to do. Online is a whole different thing. So if they come into Zendler, tell them, why don't you describe, you, well, how, Do you know other creatives, other people who have gone through this process and created online course platforms? What is the typical journey towards building a business on your platform? David Zenler (20:34.806) Yeah, it's a really good question because there are different levels coming in. The more experienced course creators don't really need a lot of help. Lots of them won't even go into the tutorials or training because they are so, you know, they've been doing it a long time. So they come in, they know what they're doing. They don't really need much help, but they might, they're probably the ones that will ask us more technical questions, education based questions, like how you can tie certain things together because you can integrate lots into Zenler as well. Then there's the people that come in that absolutely don't know anything at all, but they're very, very skilled. You know, they know what they can teach, but they just, don't know about online platforms. I just want it to be really easy. So you cater for that. So that's why we create the quick start guide, isn't it? We just step by step go through it all, make it very easy. That's why we do lots of education training. We ask people, what do you want to see? Something I didn't mention education. do a day with Zenler last Friday of each month, that six hours streaming. Lyric Kinard (21:13.909) Exactly. David Zenler (21:33.42) So people have ample chance to ask because sometimes I'll say, look, I don't know what I'm going to do now. So tell me, tell me what you want to see. And I can do build straight in front of them. I did a build showing as a new member. And this was the thing, right? New members coming in and they get overwhelmed. Tech stuff, all this stuff, stuff that is just stuff to them at this stage. And I wanted to go in and prove that within eight minutes, Lyric Kinard (21:56.067) night. David Zenler (22:02.914) being in the platform, you can have your site up and it work as a lead generator. I did it in seven minutes, 42 seconds inside Zenla. So is it hard? Even if it took you four times as long, it'd take you under an hour to have something that you could start to shout about and generate leads. So we try and help those people that... When we do lives, I'm very conscious, like when we're running a live and I see people on screen and I see some of their cameras and I see that they're looking blurry or it's washed out on the camera, I will private message them and say, look, if you change these settings in there, where you go into the settings in your webcam, you turn this, if you turn the light on, so your camera's got a bit more light, that can help you. So it might not be. anything to do with camera setups, the workshop, but I'll just pick up because I'm always looking and trying to help people and offer. If I'm looking at someone's website, I'll say, yeah, that looks good, but you could do this, you could do this. So we're trying to offer advice with people going forwards and almost audit things as you go through it. So I think like any level you're coming in, we've got something that can help you move forwards and you on the on the Facebook group or our community, you've only got to ask. We have lots of people just asking and we make sure that we answer the question. So we help them going forwards. Does that answer your? Lyric Kinard (23:38.69) little bit. It's basically if you don't know anything about tech, in and we'll help you figure it out. So I noticed on the tutorials, and there really are so many of them, for a while you were using searchy. Has that disappeared for being able to search all of those video tutorials? David Zenler (23:47.34) It is. David Zenler (24:04.278) Yeah, we try lots of different things out. want to start, you know, we had Searchy in there, because Searchy is really good at searching for the videos within there, but Searchy changed quite a bit. And Rakesh, many, many, many years ago, right, he said, I really want Searchy to be part of Zendaya itself. So maybe that gives a hint of things to come, you know. I'm not saying anything but we took it out because we were like actually do you know what we want to make the site so that we don't have to use something like searchy so we redesigned it all that the current tutorial site has been revisioned for since i came in a major revisions to simplify things and make things easier for people to find content because that was a big one when there's so much content it becomes hard to find you know Lyric Kinard (24:32.078) Yeah. Lyric Kinard (24:57.218) That's actually my main complaint about Zendler, if there is one, is that when I go into the tutorials, there's so much there that I know the answer I need is somewhere, but there's so much there that trying to figure out where the answer is. David Zenler (25:10.562) Right. But let me stop you. Let me stop you. What we've done is we've dovetailed all of our tutorials and training. We've put them into our YouTube channel. We've got them indexed. So you really just have to ask Google. Lyric Kinard (25:27.886) Mmm. David Zenler (25:29.048) and it'll pop up. Is it something that people don't do? We have questions and I'm like, look at this Google link. Choose one of our videos that suits you. Lyric Kinard (25:38.986) Okay, user feedback in the tutorials at the top, you need to have really big in a bold headline, Google your question. Because I didn't know that either. I thought I would just go to the tutorials and find it there. And that's what I'll do from now on. And then I'll probably take us right back. David Zenler (25:49.122) Yeah. David Zenler (25:55.618) Yeah. Well, yeah, this is the thing you see, sometimes we're always looking at ways to refine things, make things better. Tutora sites, no different. But we've also on the back end of this, because this like blows people's minds. go, well, your resources are there, there, there, there. Why aren't they all kind of in one place? But we're we are a platform that wants to market itself. So we want to make sure that we are appearing for new people, not just our paid members, because our paid members Lyric Kinard (26:24.259) absolutely. YouTube... Yeah, YouTube is the best place to find new members. David Zenler (26:25.707) Oscus. Yeah, and and what we've also got all our support docs so support.newsenda.com is our support document site. It's got videos in there searchable. It's got an AI bot in there and live reps in there as well. So that's a good place because that's we did that because people were asking I don't want to watch a video. I want to read an article. So we're like, well we put this all together for them. Right, so they can read it all. And then at the bottom, there's a video as well. Lyric Kinard (27:00.554) I may or may not have had that very conversation this week. David Zenler (27:04.62) god. Lyric Kinard (27:06.798) That's hilarious. So I'm going to have to go back and listen to this interview. Where can I find the documents that I can search? So I've been using Sendler for a number of years and I'm on it every day, messing with something, changing something, tweaking something, updating courses, updating the pages on the website. And there are still so many features. because it's so deep that I haven't even explored at all. one of the, over the past couple of years, all of the platforms have said, now we have community. Community is the big thing. Tell us about Sendler's community. What does it look like? How does it function? David Zenler (27:57.068) Yeah, fantastic. Yeah, communities came out, I think it's about a month ago. We've always had communities, but they've been more of an inline discussion, almost like a Reddit, you So what Zendaya has been working for, then built it from the ground up, is a brand new community feature. And that community feature is very reminiscent of Facebook. Okay, so it's like a circle or a Facebook, know, circle pay a hundred. Lyric Kinard (28:03.576) Mm-hmm. Right. Mm-hmm. David Zenler (28:25.838) a dollars a month or something for their community. So this is built into the platform. So this is not something we're charging extra for. This is something that goes straight into the platform when you're a paid member. But what the community is, is just a social, it's got everything. You can set up, right? You can set up public community. Now that public community, if people are gonna join it, they register. But what is unique about the public community, is that it's search indexable. So posts within there, if there are certain content, if there are certain length and if they're of interest to the search engines can be picked up on a post level. So what's this mean? This means that if your community members are starting to do detailed posts, they can start appearing on search engine results. So search engine results can then Send people can find it on the search come through join the community. So it's a lead generator It's a massive lead generator now within that as well You have the ability to set up a private community think of that as a private Facebook group Then we have a secret community. So a secret community is like for a VIP you let the people in and You can charge for these as well at the moment. We're charging through a course, but it's going to be that you can just charge for the community entry into it. It's got everything you want. It's got the about in there. You can upload videos in there, images in there, do all your emoji things, put a nice cover background behind it. You can now see who's online. You can do member approval. You can change the community type from public to private later if you want to. You can see all your members. But one of the great things that was brought in is live chat. So apart from being able to make calls or video calls on like things like WhatsApp is exactly the same. can set up, you can have live chat going on with one or two or more of your members. You can also set up group chats on there as well. So you can individually and it's live, it's instant. So when you type, you can see if someone's typing back to you, they can see your typing, they can see that you're green. So you're live, you're online. And if you go offline, it goes yellow. David Zenler (30:54.872) So they know you're offline. it's got full, it's got everything in it. And we ran a 12 session, actually it was, it ended up being 13 sessions on community. You're right. Like, yeah, 13 two hour sessions on it. It was crazy. So it just went on, it went on because we had this to cover this to cover. Cause we didn't just show you how to set it up in Zendler. Lyric Kinard (31:09.326) That's a lot. David Zenler (31:23.182) I showed the other day on the day with Zenla to actually tie a community into a course took me less than three minutes and make it active. It's very, very quick. So you might be like, well, it took you three minutes to do that. How did you do 13 sessions of two hours? If that's how quick it took you to do it. Because at Zenla, we show how to grow the community. We show you how to be a leader in the community. We tell you the type post you should be posting to get engagement. So it's a bigger thing than just the Zenla community. So it's a massive feature because we know everyone's going towards communities now. They've got all these sites that are adding community. We've got communities, we've got communities. So Zenla has got communities. Have you used it, Lyric? Lyric Kinard (32:05.698) Mm-hmm. Lyric Kinard (32:11.81) have not yet. I have not yet, but one of my goals over the next couple years, because I run three different businesses, is to simplify my tech stack, which is about 12 stories high. It's ridiculous. David Zenler (32:13.629) you got to. Lyric Kinard (32:31.97) taking time to learn all of the things on Zendler and perhaps bring everything for at least one or two of the businesses I run into one platform would be remarkably beautiful. It would save so much money too. I can't tell you how much this subscription and that subscription and this thing that connects that thing all. I mean, it's too much, of course. Zendler recently, did away, they are doing away with their free offering and I kind of don't disagree with that at all. I think that you do things when you pay for them. But they still have one of most generous free trial systems and they also, mean, even some of the really expensive platforms still take a cut of all of your course registrations, right? On top of your subscription. So tell me about Sendler's upcoming pricing. David Zenler (33:39.362) Yeah, so what's happening is we were thinking very, very hard about this because when we first started, had a free plan. was pretty much unlimited. You could pretty much do everything. Back then in those days, we didn't have lives in there. We didn't even have a blog in there. But we had everything that's functional. So you could create any pages. You could create a marketing funnel. You could create your courses or bundles to turn it into a membership. And you could do that as a free member. And the only thing we put against it was like every, every transaction you make, take 10%. Lyric Kinard (34:18.102) as you should because you've done all the work. David Zenler (34:19.244) But. Yeah, but every transaction. So what we found is a lot of people were just using the platform to host videos, media, send out emails and some of them not good. You know, some of them were phising emails and these sort of things, they were going out, know, they spamming people. It wasn't good. So we limited it. Then we limited again and we limited again. And it's still now pretty you can do. Lyric Kinard (34:23.106) Mm-hmm. Right. Lyric Kinard (34:30.498) Mmm. David Zenler (34:45.1) what you like in there, but you're limited on the amount of emails you can send out, like a hundred or something. You can't import users in. And this was all to stop, you know, a few bad eggs really. You know, it's always the same way. You have something and you're being really generous and good with this. And then suddenly people come in and abuse it and you've got to lock that down. You've got to keep things safe. So we were like, we got thousands of these free sites, lots of which are not being used. People try. come in to be a course creator and then they know that there's good, there's hard work to do. And then they just jump out, you know, it's the usual thing. Even though you can put a site together in eight minutes, like I said, it's just too much time. So I'm off, right? So, but with that came a sort of realization that what we should be doing here to make it easier is to actually have it as a trial for a paid plan because exactly like you said Lyric, know, you take, you will more, you're more likely to move things forwards if it's costing you something. And if it's not, you're going to leave it on the show. I'll get to that tomorrow. You know, if it's free or get to it tomorrow. I'm not saying everybody, cause some of our free users are making a lot of money, you know, they're bringing a lot of money in. So, but most are not. They're hobbyists. So how we need to say to our free users, like stop being a hobbyist. Let's take this seriously. We're going to help you. We're going to spend a lot of time and we're going to help you guys get to where you need to go to be motivated and to realize that you can do it. And that's what we decided to do. So the free plan has been running for six years or over six years. is coming to an end. Our existing users, don't worry, because like at Zenlo, we're very transparent about all this and the CEO went on the Facebook group and he talked all about this in front of everybody. You know, who does that? Who does that? Most companies like they'll just go bang. That's the price. That's what we're doing. You know, just. So he went on and he said it and we were like, OK, so now what we're going to do is we're going to support our users. So. Lyric Kinard (36:59.406) All David Zenler (37:08.972) The first thing we're going to do is say to our free users, don't panic. We're going to give you three months still. So you're a lot of time. So you would move on this now, get it up to where you're making money and then it won't be a problem to jump across. If you haven't by that stage, you know, then talk to us. We're always there on the Facebook group. If you start panicking, Rakesh is really good. He, he's very considerate to people and their needs. So you've only got to ask and talk about things. And I'm one of these people that if you don't ask, you don't get, you know, you've got to ask, haven't you? So you can ask these things, but mainly it's like when we hit the 1st of June, it's going to be people coming in on the paid on the paid plan are going to, so on the 1st of June, we're going to have no more free sites. So we're doing a special Lyric Kinard (38:04.686) Do you mean July? David Zenler (38:07.18) I think June 1st we stopped the free site thing. Lyric Kinard (38:10.346) today. David Zenler (38:11.726) Oh, oh, today, maybe July 1st. Oops, oops. Yeah, this is new. This is all new. So I'm trying to get these. I was saying to Rakesh the other day, I've got to remember all these things because I'm going to lose it. So we got quite a few things planned, but it basically means when it comes in and I think, yeah, I think you're right. It's July 1st. Then what happens is that anybody coming in can try the pro plan and that way they're going to have access to everything. Lyric Kinard (38:13.27) Hahaha Lyric Kinard (38:19.629) Right David Zenler (38:41.57) But initially we're going to let them have access to the pro plan. It's going to be a limited pro plan, but it'll have access to everything for two months. Right. Lyric. Lyric Kinard (38:53.09) All most places give you 14 days and you also have to enter a card in order to do that. David Zenler (38:59.424) Yep, this is is two months. So this is hot news as well, they're explaining, you know about this. So this is hot, hot news. Right. So as soon as they come in, they've got two months to get up speed. Now, what we're going to do as the education team is we're going to help those people. Lyric Kinard (39:10.574) I did watch the CEO video. David Zenler (39:24.75) So we're helping our free members that already they should follow along with us, helping them get those leads. So when it hits that month too, they then pay. But remember what happens when you pay for any platform. What do you get when you pay for any platform? You get 30 day money back guarantee, don't you? So you've actually got, you've got three months. Okay, you pay it on two, but you got three months if you change your mind. Lyric Kinard (39:47.886) Very nice. David Zenler (39:54.038) So we're doing that start with when we come into full launch then and our prices are going to go up with this as well, by the way. So they're scaling up. And then when we hit final launch, then what will happen is we then have 40. We're not sure yet. Could be 14, could be 30 days trial, but we won't have two months. It's too long. We're doing this as a special thing to, you know, push things along and try and get our free members to. Lyric Kinard (40:19.597) nice, okay. David Zenler (40:23.694) come up to where they should be. But up until our full launch price, we are grandfathered. So what does grandfathering mean? Grandfathering means that if you come in on the platform and the pay plans, the price never goes up for you. So at the moment, I'm just going to talk about most popular plan and that's the pro plan. It's 67 a month and that's monthly or billed annually. It works out to be $54 a month. And if you lock in now, and as long as you don't leave the platform and come back, that's the price that you get. So it works out to be $647 a year on our Pro plan. And we have members because we've been upping the price on grandfathering the price, but upping the price towards launch. We have members like Tracy Browning. who's been on the platform since 2019. She's a quilter, long arm quilter. She teaches all over the world. She lives in Australia and she has a farm and she is paying 200 and something a year for her plan. Lyric Kinard (41:34.602) and will for as long as she's on because you guys, when you grandfather, you mean it and you say, nope, we're not gonna come in next year and suddenly quadruple your price. David Zenler (41:46.998) Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's all about honesty and trust. If we break the trust of our users, everybody will leave. So we even people, if we know people leaving, we'll ask them why. And I've never in five years had someone turn around and said, I'm leaving the platform because it's not very good. I've never heard that. I've heard people say they're leaving the platform because they're not ready yet and because they can't afford it. Lyric Kinard (42:11.95) Mm-hmm. David Zenler (42:14.104) And we've tried to help people. And in fact, we have behind the scenes. We've had people that have had very, have had very bad, a very bad time and asked us if we could hold it for them. And Rakesh has. He's something he wouldn't tell anyone, but he's done it a few times just to help. And that just shows, that's why I, that's why I work here, Lyric. Lyric Kinard (42:40.856) That's, it's human. It's very human and compassionate to have a business that, especially an online business where you're not in the room with somebody. You don't have to be face to face with somebody and then still be compassionate, still be a human centered, a community centered company. It's a beautiful thing to see in the world nowadays, right? David Zenler (43:02.158) Mm. David Zenler (43:07.414) Yeah, it is. It is because that's what we're doing. We always look at it. We call our members like part of the Zendler family. OK. And there's a reason we do that and we treat them like family. And that's it. You know, we'll help them. We'll try and help them as much as we can. And we try to get them successful or we get them help. And that's what I think as a platform. That's what I love about Zendler. That's where that connection is. Lyric Kinard (43:37.4) Very nice, very nice. Well, David, I'm gonna throw a question at you as one of our, I do this to everybody, and we are mostly creatives and you can answer this absolutely with any answer you want. Nothing's off the table. What is the last thing you made? David Zenler (44:01.774) last thing I made I would say well the last thing I made because I consider even being online made made something so the last thing I made is a day was ender where I ran a six-hour session over the whole day for my community members and I loved it because I had the chance it was really funny because like it was Lyric Kinard (44:18.36) Very nice. David Zenler (44:26.19) I saw almost two days before I was like, you know what I'm going to do for that day was a completely different plan for what I was going to do. And then it all changed because of the pricing thing and change. So I was like, you know what? I'm going to I'm going to build this. I'm going to challenge myself and I'm going to try and build something in the quickest time possible. it's showing the Xena platform live in front of people's faces and see how far and I had a little a little stop clock. I was like, right, let's go. Let's build this. So that Lyric Kinard (44:49.176) Hahaha Lyric Kinard (44:53.934) Yeah David Zenler (44:55.574) You know, it's for me, that is the creative process. I love, you know what, I love it. I love, I love my job so much. Like someone saying like, how do you build a car? How do you build a nice course card in Canva? Let's do it. Let's do it. Let's go and build something. You know, do you like that color? and then I normally share this stuff with them. So I'll give templates out to people, but all the stuff that I do, I give templates out. Lyric Kinard (44:58.018) make it again. Lyric Kinard (45:16.61) we didn't even talk about that. That when you go into the put an image in anywhere in one of the sender blocks, it brings up a Canva template. Who does that? There's so many things that make it so much easier. Sorry to interrupt, but yes. David Zenler (45:28.385) Yeah. David Zenler (45:33.484) No, it's all right. That's the last thing I built. mean, if you want physically built, I built a cupboard behind me. Lyric Kinard (45:38.184) No, that's fantastic. you built a cupboard. That's amazing. That is awesome. I built a stack of books on the floor the other day because I had to move a bookshelf. We know how that goes. Well David, it is such an honor that you were able to take time out of your incredibly busy schedule to David Zenler (45:49.775) yeah, I got a sack of clothes! Lyric Kinard (46:05.614) I mean, if there's a family here at Sendler, you might be like the mom who works 24-7 in his uncle all the time. You need to get some of the kids to help out with the chores, David Zenler (46:18.734) Well I'm actually off on Monday, I'm going away for five days. I said to the boss, I said look I'm burnt. Right I'm burnt. So the last thing I made I guess is with you because I'm out of it. Lyric Kinard (46:27.342) You need a break. And then you're off for the mom's vacation. Well done. David, thank you so much for taking time to share what you know about this platform with our audience. It's been delightful and very informative and also heartwarming. Thank you. David Zenler (46:50.424) Thank you for the opportunity, Lyric. It's been really, really enjoyable. And about time. We've been trying to connect for a while. Lyric Kinard (46:55.502) And we made it happen. Well, my friends, come back next time, but listen to this, listen to it again, go check out the Zendler platform and see what you can build, see what you can create because the joy of creativity, the beauty that you bring into the lives of your students around the world is so needed today. It's so important. It is a way for us to connect and bring something good, bring something good into this world. So take care, keep creating, and we will see you next time.