Spending on software: Online business growing pains

Whether you’re running a service-based business or a digital course empire, software is part of your reality. When we resist it, we waste time, when we embrace it, we risk wasting money.

In this episode, Jenna spills the tea on her past tech fears, subscription mistakes (resume builder she paid for years?!), and the tools she now swears by to run her business smoother, smarter, and without draining her profits.

We talk about how to pick tech that scales with you, what to avoid (especially if you're prone to signing up for stuff willy-nilly), and how to think of systems and software as *investments* in your business.

This episode will help you:

• Feel more confident choosing tools and software
• Avoid common (costly) tech mistakes
• Streamline the backend of your business
• Reframe your fear into problem-solving

💻 🎁 Grab the free tech stack doc mentioned in the episode! It includes Jenna’s actual software list, plus beginner-friendly tech setups for launching a course, group program, or digital offer.

🔗 Get 'The 7 Figure Tech Stack'

https://parkdale-republic.lpages.co/opt-in-7-figure-tech-stack/ 

You’ll walk away with practical insights to make your marketing, business, and social media way easier—and a reminder to unsubscribe from software you're not using anymore 💁🏼‍♀️.

✨Tap here to watch a FREE masterclass on “How To Get Clients From Instagram (without wasting hours glued to your phone)"

https://parkdale-republic.lpages.co/evergreen-webinar-registration/

Tap here to get your free Posts That Sell Template (This caption got us 10 sales calls in 3 hours)

https://parkdale-republic.lpages.co/10-sales-calls-new

🎉 Tap here to work with Jenna inside Magic Marketing Machine (or MMM+)!

https://www.magicmarketingmachine.com

Music by Jordan Wood

Hosted by Jenna Harding (Warriner), Creator of Magic Marketing Machine

Transcript

Let's talk about technology, fear of it, and just see if we can make your life just two eights easier. Four eights, 50%. 75 % better, more streamlined, and easier using software and technology. And this is coming from someone who been notoriously afraid of technology, slow on the uptick. I was like the last person.

of all of my friends to get on Instagram. One time I cried having to set up an automated calendar. My friends at the time never let me live it down. So I just want you to know that even though I might seem like a very tech savvy person now, this did not come naturally to me. And if you're intimidated by tech or always afraid that you're gonna spend the wrong money and get trapped in a subscription, paying monthly, eating away at your profits, like all of these fears, I'm right there with you. I totally understand.

especially when your business is online or even just a part of it is online. Maybe you have a service-based business, but you do have an online booking calendar and you use QuickBooks as your invoicing software or maybe you do Zoom sessions, you know? You're still kinda running an online business or we'll say like online hybrid.

You don't need to be selling courses and digital products and an online membership to have a lot of your business' elements be happening online, which then means you need software, you need technology, and we need to figure out a way to make it work for you and keep those nice, sweet, tasty profit margins healthy.

speaking of profit margins, if you have a service-based business and traditional online business, I can't be traditional because it's brand new, an online business like a course, a membership or program or a mastermind or something, guess what? Already, don't tell the others, but we're winning.

We are already winning because these types of businesses have way better profit margins than a product-based business. You likely don't have the overhead of a space, you don't have the cost of a product that you're selling or shipping or manufacturing, all of that we don't need to spend. So it's very easy to make a lot of money very quickly and in an easier way

in a service-based business

where the main expense is gonna be humans and a little bit of software.

And we just need to make sure those software costs don't get out of control. And I think what happens to a lot of us is we make a mistake. I recently made a mistake. my goodness. I'll tell you what I did. my business went over onto Airtable and we're using it as sort of like a CRM, like a client relationship management. And basically all of the information stored hither tither in my world. My operations manager has put it all into Airtable. It's very organized. It's so much data. It's

I was never this organized before so anyway Air table does not cost much. I think it's like $27 or something and Then as you add team members you pay for each of the team members, and I was adding team members Willy-nilly Willy-nilly

I was adding so many people and not realizing that I was paying per head. eventually I reached out to my ops person. I was like, hey, aren't air table bills like $300? Is that normal? Like I know we're using it in a pretty robust fashion. is that kind of what we were expecting? And she's like, uh, no, it should not be that much money. Oops. Okay. So we make mistakes like this. Actually, I remember another one. I remember another one where I...

I signed up for this resume software, software to make a resume. This was like a really long time ago. I had pretty much just moved in with my now husband, so seven years ago.

Wait, why was I making a resume? my gosh, no. It would have been before I started dating him. Basically, I signed up for this resume writing website And it ended up being a monthly charge. And I paid that monthly charge for like a year or two. And then once I got together with Jordan, he spotted it on my credit card bill because he's an accountant. And he just glanced and was like, what's that? And I didn't realize I had been paying it. And I did not have the money at the time.

to be paying for something like that. So anyway, we make these mistakes and then we fear investments in our business and then we fear signing up for new tech. And even though we would drop $100 on a pair of pants super easily when we see $100 on a product online that could really, really help us, we're hesitant because of these mistakes we've made. If that doesn't resonate with you, then awesome. You're doing better than I am. If that doesn't resonate and you haven't made wrong choices,

or choices you're beating yourself up about, that's awesome.

another thing, this is gonna sound like left field and you know what, maybe it is. I just want you to have a nice drive right now or dog walk or whatever you're doing. We're just gonna chit chat a little. When I finished college, I moved to Toronto and I moved there.

kind of last minute because when I finished college I was scared and I was like I'm just gonna go home and then I think one of my teachers was like you're not really just gonna go home right like you're gonna go try and make it at this whole acting thing and I was like okay fine so at the last second I found a rooming house in a rough neighborhood in Toronto that I could move into so it was not a great living situation. ⁓

and it was this like three story house, but it was cut up into all these different apartments and different people living in just a room. And every now and I would see someone and be like, you have a baby? Like how long has this person been here? How many people live in this house? And I was up in the attic and it was so hot. It was so, so hot. And all I had was this teeny tiny window, really, I don't know how big it was, really small.

And one day, it was so hot up there that I had dropped a chocolate chip on the floor. Don't judge me. I am who I am. I dropped a chocolate chip on the floor and it wasn't even in the sun. It was like near an internal wall and it melted. That's how hot it was. So, and I bought a fan, you know, again, using money I didn't have and anyway,

I was so warm up there that I thought, here's what I'll do. I'll pile up all my pillows so that my body is flush with the window, the tiny window, and I will run my pajamas under the sink.

into the water and then I'll put on my wet pajamas and sleep next to the window, hoping like a breeze will hit me and I'll be cool. So that's what I did. Really smart problem solving. I know, I know. And I was 21, alright? Whatever. I made myself so ill. don't, maybe it was pneumonia, bronchitis, I don't know what it was, but it was really freaking sick. Do you know how sick I got? In the middle of a heatwave in the middle of the summer, got myself so ill from doing that, but I didn't know.

I didn't know. Sometimes you don't even know enough to Google what you don't know. One of my favorite things to say is you don't know what you don't know.

And I say that because if there is an annoyance in your business, if something that you're trying to do online is slow, if there's something that could use a process, if there's a whole bunch of stuff you're storing up in your head and not sure how to bring to fruition, if you have a clunky onboarding process with your clients or offboarding process, if you keep forgetting to invoice people, I'm just gonna tell you right now.

there's a better way to do it. There is a solution out there. It might cost you a couple bucks a month in a monthly subscription, but there is a better way to do it. It exists already. Everything exists. my goodness. Actually, under this episode, you will find a free document where I have listed out all of the tech I use in my business. Everything. And I link to it so you can know the softwares that I'm using.

and I even added a section at the bottom that's a beginner tech stack. That's what it's called, tech stack is like all the pieces of software you use to accomplish your goal. So I put a tech stack there if you want to launch a course, a tech stack there if you want to start a group program. It's not the most perfect, but it's what I would recommend. And so the huge portion of this document is what I actually use. And then a couple of like what I would recommend some of the easiest ways to launch something like that without having to sign up for a million different things.

Or also, I considered products that will scale with your for instance, you could start email marketing with Mailchimp, but eventually you're gonna have to transfer to something that is a more robust piece of software. So instead, I really recommend you start with Kit, which is the email software I use. It's free for up to a thousand...

subscribers but then by then you're gonna be using it in a more robust way you're gonna need some of the bigger features you want to go big so now that I have grown my business I can look back and be like okay I would use that again I wouldn't use that again anyway I put it all together on there

I think this comes up.

for me and my clients and selling my program, Magic Marketing Machine, and it probably also comes up for you and your clients is a lot of the time people don't realize that there is a better way out there to do something. And then your job in your marketing is to show them, hey, there's a better way to do this. That's easier. That's faster. That's cheaper. That feels better. That has more longevity for you. You're selling something that

gets people somewhere in a better way than if they tried to do it themselves, right? But a lot of our clients don't realize there is a better way. So I'm telling you right now when it comes to tech, anything that's taking you a long time, like even batching content. Wow, I'm really all over the place today, but like even batching content.

People come to me and they say they don't want to try it because they already tried it and it wasn't fun or it didn't work for them. You haven't tried it my way. Do you think that I, the queen of fun, don't have a fun and the person who's tech-averse? The queen of fun who's tech-averse, you'd think, come on, trust me. You know I have a better way up my sleeve for you to batch your content and create more content quickly and spend less time on your phone. it's my whole thing. Anyway loves, get that tech stack freebie.

It's below this episode. start flagging the things in your business that take you too long or aren't fun or are clunky or need to be more organized and start questioning if there's a better way to do it and what that is and then when it comes time to make an investment in your business to make it move faster, be more smooth and let you stop stressing so much, make that investment.

want to resist the millennial thing of saying like thank you for coming to my TED talk. ⁓ It really is just a cop out for when you don't know otherwise how to end something.