How Income School built a branded app 12x faster than custom developers with Circle Plus
“Our members were really excited about [the branded app]. What we had before… the website and all the course content…it worked well, but it wasn't the same. Now it's a full app.”
Ricky Kesler
Founder, Income School
Overview
Challenge
A web and content education company was mired in tech debt—and not walking the walk
Solution
A consolidated platform and branded app that streamlined both management and member experience—12x faster
Meet Income School, the content creator educators of the pre-TikTok era
One day, Ricky Kesler got a text that said “I have a business proposal for you. Call me.”
While most people would take this as a sign to block that number, Ricky called out of curiosity. An old school friend of his, Jim Harmer, was looking for a co-founder to build up an internet marketing education site after having scaled and sold several other “hobby” websites.
They launched their course-based membership program, Income School, on Wordpress in 2015—but couldn’t have predicted its success or how complex managing this business would become as they grew.
Income School—where they teach people how to make money blogging and creating digital content for YouTube and social media—grew to over 1,000 members and seven-figures in revenue over the next seven years.
Unfortunately, while the membership was thriving and their business was growing—there were some foundational issues behind the scenes slowing them down and preventing them from showing up as professional as they wanted to.
Challenges: A patchwork of solutions that didn’t add up to an easy-to-run business
The main issue?
As their business needs evolved, Ricky and his team layered on various Wordpress plugins to solve the operational problems-of-the-day, but over time, this patchwork of fixes was neither scalable nor resilient.
Their website was held together by Wordpress plugins and prayers (and constantly on the brink of breaking) while they purported to teach people how to build, and monetize their websites.
It went against everything in their Idahoan natures to not be able to represent the high quality things they were teaching—and it didn’t look great for their brand, either.
“I teach people how to build their own websites, and then I have things breaking on my website. And I'm like, "You don't understand how complex this is compared to what I'm teaching you." But still, that alone was problematic.”
Ricky was spending hours upon hours of his own time fixing bugs on his own website—time that should have been spent on creating content, strategizing for business growth, and managing his small but mighty team as co-founder.
Instead, Income School had three payment tools, a plugin with Zoom for live group calls, Wordpress plugins for membership accounts, and a CEO as a web developer.
“It just got to be all of the different things we had to use, all the different WordPress plugins and stuff, it became this big mess, so we accumulated a lot of tech debt, basically. We [were] stuck in this system.”
This led to a poor member experience on two fronts:
- The platform's bugginess undermined the educational content Income School was putting out
- The sunk cost of a bad foundation pulled Ricky’s focus from addressing members' needs to merely keeping the platform operational
“I was doing a lot of development work for so long, but people weren't really seeing much, they're just like, ‘Man, is this getting any upgrades? What's going on?’”
Ricky felt stuck.
He knew it was time to fix the foundation—properly—which is why he spent an entire year working with some freelance developers to help “clean things up” a little bit.
“I had already spent the better part of a year working with some developers… to try to essentially rebuild our website, clean things up, and be able to try to get a little bit better tracking. Just trying to get a little bit more professional with how we approach things and consolidate a lot of our technology.”
He was worried that a custom solution he’d have to maintain himself wasn’t the answer—plus, it would cost more money and work later to elevate as web design and development continued progressing and changing.
“This was dragging on, it was taking a long time, and it was still pretty complicated. And in the end, we were just going to end up with something incredibly custom, which is also hard to maintain and expensive because it's hard to do ourselves.”
Not only had they spent a year and poured thousands of dollars to fix the issues plaguing their website, but they hadn’t solved them.
But what if there was a way to create an engaging, seamless member experience without managing the technical overhead himself—in less time, for less money?
Thankfully, there was—with Circle Plus.
Solution: A consolidated, branded membership platform that smoothed out the wrinkles and engaged learners
Ricky realized they were putting bandaids over bullet holes with Income School, and they couldn’t keep patching things up if they were meant to “practice what they preach” when it came to website and business building.
Push came to shove right as Ricky was about to sign a $12,000 one-year agreement with Wistia, where they hosted all of their course content. He knew he couldn’t just get rid of Wistia and not replace it.
“But I was like, "This is crazy because with Circle Plus, I don't need Wistia at all."
As he envisioned Income School’s future, he wanted a tool that united all his patchwork plugins, automated platform updates, simplified member experiences, and enhanced on what they’ve already built.
“When I'm considering the cost balance, it's like, gosh, I can write off $12,000 that I don't have to spend next year [on Wistia] if I just move to Circle Plus. And then I was looking at all the custom development I was doing. I was like, Holy cow, [Circle Plus] is actually going to save me money and to be a better solution.”
With Circle Plus, Ricky consolidated all the plugins, APIs, and workarounds he’s been using to keep the business together—in one branded app.
Not only did he save money on video hosting, but he managed to replace three different payment systems, a Zoom plugin to host live group calls, and event calendars, among a host of other things.
“For our old system, we used a plugin that connected to Zoom and would then show a calendar of when all these things were.
Now it's just built in, and it's fantastic. We do a lot of live group calls, and it's all in there. If people want to have a discussion about that group call, there's the recording, and then the thread beneath it is where that discussion takes place. It's so much better organized, it feels really good.”
Being able to have one central authority on all things Income School was a massive improvement over having to manage disparate tools, site glitches, and broken member experiences.
“Our members were really excited about [the branded app]. What we had before… the website and all the course content…it worked well, but it wasn't the same. Now it's a full app.”
The old way of doing things eroded confidence in the brand’s mission, but now, every piece of the member journey is seamless, integrated, and high-quality: from courses and conversations to live coaching calls. And it’s all accessible via their Income School app.
Plus, with Circle Plus automatically surfaces analytics and insights “that were simply too complex” before—and smoothes out patched-together member experiences.
Circle’s end-to-end, best-in-class analytics gives Ricky a bird’s eye view into how his members are behaving. That means he can remove roadblocks as soon as they're spotted, trigger automated DMs with relevant resources, and re-engage members before they ever have the opportunity to drop off.
“It's something that we've been trying to build out on our own website for a long time: see where people are getting stuck, and then create an automation.
So, if somebody completes this lesson but they don't complete another one for a certain amount of time, we can send them an email or a push notification that offers to give them some sort of help or provides them with the resource that they need.
We wanted to do more smart stuff like that, and it just wasn't ever quite working. It was just too complex. Circle Plus allows us to do that.”
Circle Plus gave Income School the power of behind-the-scenes automation—no more expensive redesigns, development, or bug fixes. Just automatic, dynamic, customer-requested enhancements that made Ricky look like a superhero.
“The frustrating thing with [having] your own website is as web design changes over the course of a few years, the style of our website looks outdated, and then we have to do a whole redesign and a lot of custom work.
Whereas a platform like Circle is updating and upgrading over time, so we just get to go along with that and don't have to be constantly working on design updates as well as feature updates.”
Now, Ricky doesn’t need to maintain his brand-new app or spend excessive energy on improvements. He's free to simply focus on creating great content, connecting with members, and growing his business, while Circle handles the rest.
With Circle Plus, Ricky got the freedom to enhance what was working, strengthen what wasn’t—and add new features without lifting a finger.
“I'm also super impressed at how quickly you guys are iterating on adding new features.
With what we were using before (the WordPress plugin), it seemed like three years go by—and we've been wanting this one feature and asking for it, and we're not seeing almost anything coming out.
And you guys are just on top of stuff, so that's been exciting to see.”
Tapping into Circle’s 30+ person product and engineering team—without really even lifting a finger—means a huge weight lifted off of Ricky’s shoulders. No more stress of managing a custom-coded solution that piles on tech debt by himself.
Just sitting back and watching as his app and offering gets consistently better—and confidently taking credit for how it grows, evolves, and improves all the time.
For example, because of Circle Plus’ ability to add a “waiting room”/free tier, Ricky is able to uplevel his free offerings while using branded notification to pull people further down the brand’s marketing funnel.
“[The branded app] also allowed us to create free content for people to just subscribe to.
Now that they can just have our app and we can send them notifications and stuff and get them in there for free and participate with us at that free level. This just made it so that my free tier stuff could just level way up.”
With this, Ricky has carved out a new space in the community to share valuable, free nurture content. This allows him to send timely and relevant notifications straight to prospects' phones— “a huge upgrade over an email list.”
With Circle Plus, Income School got more value, faster, for less money—including a branded app.
The business went from…
- the cofounder acting as de-facto developer and bug fixer to investing his valuable time into the member experience and business growth
- messy, patched-together member experience, to smooth, seamless one-platform management
- bleeding money on constant, custom updates, to investing in a platform that grows with the business
Results: A brand that reflects their growth and mastery—and attracts engaged learners
Ricky and Jim have a successful business—on the outside. But they were paddling real hard under the water, struggling to manage little issues that took up a lot of their time.
Before, they couldn’t count the amount of tools they were using on one hand, were constantly fixing one thing or chasing down another, and couldn’t tackle the smart things they’ve always wanted to do.
Now, not only are they working from one main source of truth and insight—but they’ve improved the experience for their members, too, resulting in higher than average engagement. 45% of Income School’s members log-in to the community at least one time a month, which is 3X higher than the average for a community their size.
Ultimately, the Income School branded app became the centerpiece to their growth strategy and business management—and Ricky and Jim are finally practicing what they preach when it comes to efficient, smart, foundational web strategy and digital marketing know-how.
“It’s been a crazy time for our industry… so seeing this change made it really clear to people that I'm actively investing in this business.
This big change happening over such a short time, it instilled confidence for members that I'm actively working on things for them and trying to make things better.”
And, they got a done-for-you app, white glove content and payment migrations, enough video storage for all his courses—12x faster than working with developers on “custom” solutions.
“They were like, "Oh, by the way, it's probably going to take 30 days. Is that okay?" I was like, "Wait, are you kidding me? This will all be migrated and done in a month?" It's crazy.”