A Case Study on Advanced Niche Online Course Marketing and Dealing with International Tax Issues

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Niche Course Marketing With ClickFunnels and International Tax Compliance

In this LifterLMS case study, AV programming instructor Patrick Murray explains how he turned two decades of audio-visual automation experience into a niche online course business. He walks through his ClickFunnels marketing funnel, the custom Stripe webhook that connects ClickFunnels to his LifterLMS site, and how Taxamo automates EU VAT collection so he can legally sell his courses to buyers around the world.

What You’ll Learn

• How a 20 year audio visual programming veteran turned decades of niche expertise into a paid online course
• How one YouTube video and an active industry forum produced Patrick Murray’s first course sale
• How ClickFunnels combines landing pages, email marketing, and affiliate management into a single stack
• Why international course creators need to collect VAT, and how a tool like Taxamo automates it
• How a custom Stripe webhook connects a ClickFunnels checkout to a LifterLMS powered course site

Key Takeaways

• Test a course topic with one focused, in depth YouTube video before you build anything else
• Post genuinely useful content, not links, in the niche forums where your ideal students already gather
• Tell the story behind your expertise in a webinar instead of teaching for the entire time slot
• Talk to a tax professional before you decide how to handle VAT if you sell to buyers outside your home country
• Start any custom development project with the smallest possible working version before you add complexity

Frequently Asked Questions

Full Webinar Transcript

Introducing Patrick Murray and the AV Programming Niche

Chris Badgett: Hello everyone, and welcome back to another LifterLMS webinar. Today we’ve got a special guest, Patrick Murray. He’s a course creator who’s done a lot of interesting things with LifterLMS, including some more advanced marketing. His niche is in AV technology, so we’re going to get into the case study of his journey as a course creator.

He’s using a tool called ClickFunnels for more advanced marketing, and he’s also developed a product that connects ClickFunnels to LifterLMS, so it can sell through the ClickFunnels platform and the course activates on a separate LifterLMS site. He built that with Dennis Hall over at LearningTemplates.com, and we’ll post a link in the chat where you can see that ClickFunnels product. We’re also going to get into dealing with international tax issues, so we’re going to cover a lot of interesting course builder issues that people in more advanced situations run into.

But first, Patrick, I just want to thank you for coming on the webinar.

Patrick Murray: Thanks for having me on, Chris. Really excited about this. I’ve got a lot of this stuff going on in my head, and it’s really nice to have the opportunity to talk about it with other course creators.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. It’s just an act of getting stuff out of your head, talking about it, teaching about it, and sharing your experience. It’s part of the teacher’s journey, so I’m really excited for this one. If those of you listening have any questions as we go, there’s a Q&A feature in Zoom you can use, so feel free to drop in questions along the way. We’ll go through the main conversation here and then open it up to Q&A at the end.

Patrick, can you tell us a little bit about your niche, and what AV is all about?

What AV Automation Actually Means

Patrick Murray: AV stands for audio visual, and it’s basically, well, we control the lights and the shades, and it’s a lot more than audio visual. That’s kind of where we got our start, in corporate boardrooms 10 or 20 years ago with big CRT projectors. But electronics have gotten a lot cheaper over the years, so now there’s a display in every single room, there’s music and audio everywhere.

We used to have to control those devices with one button. The projector screen comes down, it turns on, it selects the right source. So it was a natural step to control the shades and the lights and things like that too. Those are the roots of my industry. When I say AV, that’s what I mean, and you find it everywhere, in high end homes, mega yachts, and it’s pretty much standard fare for corporate boardrooms and meeting rooms, any business that has a projector and equipment like that.

From Pulling Cable to Programming Control Systems

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Were you a consultant for a while, and then you wanted to teach on it? How did you get into teaching AV?

Patrick Murray: I started a long time ago actually pulling cable and building up the equipment racks, and eventually I started doing the programming for the control side. This was long before the iPhone. We had touch panels, but it was funny because nobody knew what the heck it was, you’d show them a touch panel and they’d be like, what’s that. But as soon as the iPhone came out, everybody understood what I did for a living.

Chris Badgett: So you were ahead of the times a little bit.

Patrick Murray: Yeah, kind of, which isn’t always a nice place to be. It was pretty painful sometimes getting things to work.

Becoming a Freelance AV Programmer in Germany

Patrick Murray: When I moved to Germany, nobody would give me a job because I didn’t speak German, obviously. So I put a sign in front of the door that said I’ll do your programming, and that was 12 years ago. I’ve been a freelance programmer ever since then.

A few years ago I just didn’t want to travel so much. I did a lot of work on the mega yachts that are built here in North Germany, and they don’t stay still, so I was always on planes running around, and my children were getting big without me being there to witness it. I was just trying to find a way to spend more time at home. Of course, over the years you accumulate some knowledge and information, and the internet is a beautiful thing because you can share it with so many people.

How One YouTube Video Started Patrick’s Teaching Career

Patrick Murray: Initially it was really hard to believe that people would be interested in anything I had to say, because you get used to what you do, it’s just normal. But it started with one video that I posted, and I got 70 subscribers overnight.

Chris Badgett: On YouTube. There’s something to it.

Patrick Murray: Yeah, it was a YouTube video, and I posted a link to it in a forum.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. A lot of people actually get their start, or start uncovering demand, by seeing what happens on YouTube. It’s actually a great way to test demand, just putting content out on YouTube.

Why a Very Specific Niche Worked in Patrick’s Favor

Chris Badgett: I just want to identify that niche, high end AV for mega yachts and boardrooms. I mean, it’s actually probably a pretty big niche, but if we go up a couple of levels we’d just be at general IT or the tech department. This is really focused on something specific. How many years had you been in the AV field before you decided to start teaching online about it?

Patrick Murray: Over 20 years. I’d been a freelance programmer for 12 years, and I still do it now. It’s not that I want to completely replace anything, I’m just looking to travel less. So it was over 10 years that I’d been doing this on my own.

Chris Badgett: That’s really awesome. I ask because I think it’s important to highlight that sometimes expertise is decades in the making. Launching a course when you’ve got that deep experience isn’t always like, oh, I think yoga is a profitable niche, maybe I’ll make a yoga course. You’re taking two decades of experience and funneling that into a course.

Turning Two Decades of Experience Into a Course

Chris Badgett: I’m curious, if somebody has that much experience, it seems like it might be hard because of the curse of knowledge, all this knowledge you have. How did you go about creating the first course? Who was the target market, how did you decide what to put into the course, how did you turn it into a package?

Patrick Murray: I didn’t really start off with that intention, honestly. I was scratching my own itch. The tools we use to program audio visual systems are actually pretty old, they haven’t changed much over the years, and there’s tons of modern software development tools, writing iOS apps, open source environments from Google and things like that, and we just don’t use them. I wanted to start using these things, and there was no information specific to AV, so I basically fought my way through it and made it work.

Through that I got a framework of, okay, I know this works, I’ve tested it, I even deployed it at a few customers using just an iPad for control instead of a typical AV controller, and it works great. But figuring it all out was a huge challenge because there was nothing specific for me. So that’s basically where it came from. I was scratching my own itch, and I figured if I had these issues finding all that information, other people probably would too.

Chris Badgett: Do you have one course now, or multiple courses?

Patrick Murray: I have multiple courses. There’s a particular manufacturer’s programming language, and I have two courses for that in particular, and then I have another course for open source things using IBM’s Node-RED, which is an open source programming language. I show people how to write cloud applications to monitor different equipment and buildings, and send text messages and alerts. And actually next week I’ll be releasing another course about iOS programming for AV control.

How Patrick Got His First Students

Chris Badgett: While I’ve got you on the spot with your course builder’s journey, how did you get your first students?

Patrick Murray: It was the YouTube video. There’s a forum for that manufacturer’s programming language, they have a forum for certified programmers, and I just posted a video there. But I think it had a lot to do with the way I phrased it. This information just wasn’t out there, how do you do this simple thing, and I used the words and terminology from the old programming language, how to do this the new way. Subject lines are a big deal, because that’s how you initially grab attention, and I think that’s really what got the initial interest. Of course the video was helpful too. I really did go step by step, so there was absolutely no way you could make a mistake, I showed every single detail. That’s the beauty of video, you hit pause, try it, and then go back for the next step.

It was really just talking to my colleagues using their language, how we talk to each other every day, and showing them something really valuable. After that I had this email list, so I locked the doors and created a whole course about how to program a complete system, a very simple room with a video projector and a few sources like an Apple TV to control. Then I posted it online, sent out the email, and said, hey, I made this, you could buy it if you want, and a few people did.

Using YouTube to Attract Students and Practice Teaching

Chris Badgett: I want to highlight a similarity there. Finding a gap in the market and creating training videos on YouTube doesn’t just help you attract early adopter customers, it helps you practice teaching online. When I first learned WordPress, I was watching YouTube videos about it, and then I created my own video course about how to build a WordPress site and put those videos on YouTube, and I started getting clients from that. I think using YouTube as part of your course building journey is a great idea, and I really admire that you found a true gap in the market where there was literally no competition, and you figured out how to take the old way of doing things and say, here’s how you do it the new way. You had a complete blue ocean you could step into.

Patrick Murray: It wasn’t really all that intentional, honestly. I was just being myself after so long in the industry, it becomes normal, and when you talk to your peers, that terminology is all there already. One of the issues I had was people weren’t sure about using this new thing, there’s still a lot of resistance to that. One of my big issues was, if I’m going to go out there and really convince people that yes, you should be learning this, I’ve got to be sure myself. So there was a lot of testing beforehand to make sure it was actually viable to put out there.

What ClickFunnels Actually Is

Chris Badgett: Let’s talk a little bit about ClickFunnels. For those of you that don’t know what it is, it’s landing page software, it’s A/B split testing software, it’s e-commerce software. Basically it allows you to build advanced marketing funnels. The guy kind of behind it, Russell Brunson, is a marketer who’s been known for a long time in the internet marketing community. He’s a really animated guy, really obsessed with marketing funnels and helping experts build, not so much a website, but a page by page marketing funnel that helps add value with lead magnets and upsells on the way to becoming a customer. Did I do that justice? How do you define ClickFunnels?

Patrick Murray: I think so. I stumbled onto it really early. Over the years I’d made web pages and tried out different builders, just the typical business card web page, here’s my company, here’s what I do, that’s it, not even a sign up sheet. So I had some experience with how difficult it is to set up a web page, and I didn’t try out many other things before ClickFunnels, because as soon as I started using their page builder I just saw how much time it would save me. There are a lot of page builders out there that kind of work, and sometimes they don’t, and then it crashes, and you’re transferring your WordPress from one hosting to another, and it can be time consuming and frustrating. With the ClickFunnels page builder it just works, and it’s really easy to understand. There are a few simple concepts, and then you’re off and running, and everything was already there, all the sign up forms, adding people to lists, email marketing is in there as well.

It was really a no-brainer, because as a programmer I know what’s behind there and how long it would normally take to do something like that. I never really looked, I didn’t do much internet marketing before I got started with ClickFunnels, so I can’t really compare it to anything else other than I had a MailChimp account and did a list with that.

What Comes Bundled Inside ClickFunnels

Patrick Murray: On top of the basic plan they have something called Actionetics, where you can manage your email lists and create funnels there, and they also have something called Backpack that lets you run your own affiliate programs, where you’re completely in control, you have a dashboard, people can register as an affiliate and they have their own dashboard for every product. It really is the whole package.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Kathy, if you’ve got Patrick’s link there, if you could throw that in the chat, if anybody here is looking to get into ClickFunnels. Just full transparency, that is Patrick’s affiliate link, but we wouldn’t be recommending ClickFunnels if you didn’t love using it, and I have a lot of respect for where it sits in the marketplace. The way you describe it, it’s a landing page building software, it’s an e-commerce software, it’s an affiliate marketing software, it’s an email marketing software. It’s one of those things that includes a bunch of things I talk about a lot, called the software Frankenstein, where you might use lead pages over here, share sale for affiliate marketing, MailChimp over here, and something else for the actual e-commerce part. To combine all of that under one roof makes a lot of sense.

What a Marketing Funnel Actually Means

Chris Badgett: Could you describe, in general terms, the concept of a marketing funnel?

Patrick Murray: It’s all the actions and interactions someone has with you, your brand, your website, and your landing pages, on their way to becoming a customer, and even after, becoming an upsell, another product, perhaps becoming an affiliate and a loyalty partner, a trusted relationship there. The funnel is a very helpful concept when people start thinking about it, and not always just going right for the sale, but really thinking about nurturing someone, not from a persuasion standpoint, but from a, let me add as much value as I can, help the customer understand the problem, and propose some solutions.

Chris Badgett: In building a marketing funnel or sales funnel, it’s helpful to think of the shape like this, and then it comes to the sale. The things at the top of the funnel, some people call that TOFU, that’s your free lead magnets, a guide, a quiz, a free video training, an email mini course. The middle of the funnel, or MOFU, could be a low price product, a more in depth ebook, a bigger commitment to read, people are starting to become problem aware, maybe they want a buyer’s guide for AV technology or whatever. And the bottom of the funnel, BOFU, is where the conversion happens, and the upselling and cross-selling.

How Patrick Structures His Own Marketing Funnel

Chris Badgett: Could you describe what your funnel looks like, in general terms?

Patrick Murray: I’ve got a few of them, because I’m always trying different things out. It’s important to realize up front, no matter what software you use, it could get really complicated, there’s no way around that, because you’re connecting all these different things. Even if it’s under one roof, you’re still connecting all these different lists, so if you have an email sequence that gets triggered by one thing, and then if somebody buys they get put on another list, it’s always a challenge to manage. I draw pictures on my whiteboard to keep track of it.

I’ve got two things I’m doing now, one is a webinar. I post Facebook ads, just post a video, and it’s very specific, so I have people who are interested in whatever company or whatever it is, and I do Facebook ads with that, and I really just post the first video of the lesson, something very simple, and it’s extremely boring, but people who understand it, those are my customers. If somebody’s looking at this and says, oh, what’s that, they click on that, I get their email address, and then I’ll drip out three or four more videos to them.

Why Storytelling Outperforms Teaching in a Webinar

Patrick Murray: What I’ve recently started doing is telling my story. This is something I discovered after reading one of Russell Brunson’s books, and I was super skeptical of the whole thing, but he’s a genuine guy and the information is incredible.

Chris Badgett: I just want to throw in there, for those of you listening, Russell just released a book called Expert Secrets. If you click the link in the chat you’ll see where you can buy it, and he actually gives it away for free, except you pay shipping, which is like six dollars or something. I just want to give people an action item if they want to go check out that book, but go ahead.

Patrick Murray: So what I took from the book is basically to tell stories. Tell people about your journey, what troubles you had, and just be honest and put it out there. I’d done that a few times before without knowing it, in email sequences, and looking back I’ve always had success with those, and whenever I just teach I get less results. There’s always this temptation of, oh, I’ll have a webinar and all I’ll do is teach for an hour and then give a five minute pitch, but when you tell stories, like last week I did a webinar on the iOS app and I taught for maybe 90 seconds, no more, and the rest was just telling stories about where I started, the challenges I had coming up with all this stuff, the lack of information out there, the frustration.

I was able to feel, it may be hard to tell if anybody’s listening, but you could kind of feel that people were interested in it, and when you’re teaching you kind of get that glazed over sometimes, but when you tell stories you can almost feel the engagement. That webinar converted over 20 percent, and it’s amazing, and it doesn’t feel like marketing to me. It always felt icky, like I don’t want to sell, I just want to do my programming and maybe help other people. But when you’re just telling stories and being honest, it doesn’t even feel like marketing at all, because you’re really just telling people where you came from, how you got where you are, the challenges you faced, and if they’re interested in those stories then there’s a connection there, and your content will probably be useful for them anyway.

Using Limited Time Offers Without Feeling Dishonest

Patrick Murray: That’s what I’m doing now, and you could do this in webinars, or you could do it in an email sequence, just leave that little cliffhanger at the end, like, you always got to watch the next episode. At the end, basically what I do with email is make a special offer, like half price, and it just runs out after a few days, and I use Deadline Funnel to manage that, and then they’ll just get redirected to the page with the full price. Because I know the common thing to do is to just say, oh, registration is closed, but that doesn’t really feel genuine to me, I’m not comfortable with that. So I make them a special offer at a reduced price, and after the offer is over they can still buy it for the full price. Those are just some of the things I’m testing now. You’ve got to find the people who are interested in your story, you’ve got to have great content, referrals are a huge deal, and you need to put it in a way that keeps people engaged and interested and makes them want to buy, and then of course you’ve got to deliver. Whenever anybody needs help I try to answer as soon as I can, and that word spreads around quickly too.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. The secret sauce is often in the support.

Where Course Creators Actually Find Traffic

Chris Badgett: I think it’s helpful to point out, for people kind of new to the concept of a funnel for your online course or membership site, the concept of the marketing funnel and the traffic are different. You were talking about using Facebook ads to drive traffic into the funnel. For people listening, there are three or four main ways to get traffic into the funnel. You can get it organically through content, you can do it through paid acquisition like Facebook ads, or through what’s known as a sticky engine of growth, where the more people use the product or the course, the more other people are going to need or want to use it too, that’s like a viral component.

Oftentimes, especially at a small level, if you can figure it out with Facebook ads and paid acquisition, that’s an interesting place to start, especially if you have no list, or a small list, and you’re really trying to get that initial traction. Usually what I’ve noticed is people get good at one of those, someone might ultimately become, I do paid ads, that’s how I get people in my funnel, somebody else might be a content person, it’s my podcast that I do twice a week, or my YouTube videos, that’s how I fill my funnel. There are different ways to fill the funnel.

Why Niche Forums Are an Underused Traffic Source

Chris Badgett: I think forums are an important thing to mention, especially when you’re getting started. You don’t want to spam any forums, but if you post something useful, that could be a great way to test the waters.

Patrick Murray: That’s a great one.

Chris Badgett: If you Google your niche and then just add the word forum to the end, it’s a totally underused method for finding your ideal community and engaging with them. You don’t want to just sell to them or spam them and drop links, but go add value in a forum. Have an open mind, if the forum looks terrible, like it was designed in 1999, those are the best ones, a million users talking about technology or whatever, and it’s a terrible looking website.

Patrick Murray: There’s a Yahoo group that’s been around for 15 years, I don’t know, 20,000 users or something. What I would do with that is post a video, and then underneath say, if you want the source code for what I just showed you, sign up here. So they give me their email, and they’re entering into my funnel. I would do the same thing with my organic gardening course, going into a forum, amazing free content, check out the courses, that’s it. A lot of comments, is it working, let’s try to bring it into the equation. Right at the beginning, as soon as I decided that I wanted to, I posted that one video on YouTube, my list increased by 70 people. That’s when I decided I’m going to make a course out of this.

Why Patrick Chose LifterLMS to Own His Course Content

Patrick Murray: I started looking around at what options are out there, and it was important to me that I own my content. There are plenty of platforms out there, especially things like Udemy, and I really wanted control over as much as possible, so anything cloud hosted wasn’t really interesting to me, especially something like Udemy where they cap the price and you have that gatekeeper. I know that from writing iOS apps, it’s a huge hassle when you do something great and you have to wait for it to get approved in an app store. It’s very similar with your courses, when you’re done you want to get it out there to your users, and you want to be the one who’s in control of that.

I really wanted something WordPress based, because WordPress is easy to use, I host it myself, and it’s my content, I always know where it is. So LifterLMS was the one that made the most sense, it was price wise very interesting, and I tried it out, and I had a whole bunch of questions, and you guys were amazing, you always got back to me in like a day with way more than I asked for, sometimes you’d send me code snippets, because of course I was trying to do funky stuff with the checkout, and you guys would say, well, we don’t have that, but check out this code, it might get you started. I never looked back, because it just works, it’s WordPress, it’s mine, and it just made sense for me.

When and Why ClickFunnels Entered the Picture

Chris Badgett: What about ClickFunnels, when did they come into the picture? LifterLMS has a course description sales page and an e-commerce system, so at what point were you like, okay, I’m going to use LifterLMS for the LMS but I’m going to use ClickFunnels for the marketing and sales?

Patrick Murray: For the first month or so I just used LifterLMS for everything, I had the Stripe integration as well. But I started, this is where we get into the tax issues, because living in Germany, my business is based in Germany, I have to collect sales tax, and it’s a complicated topic. I needed a way to see where somebody was buying, and to control who purchases what, and the input field for their sales tax ID number, and that’s where things started getting into an area where I had to develop custom things. I started looking around for another way to do it, and the checkout thing, ClickFunnels had this Taxamo integration already, which we can talk about.

I don’t know if that was the main motivator, but it was definitely one of the things that encouraged me to start looking around, this tax issue, but also just marketing, putting up landing pages. You can do things with WordPress, but a page builder, the first thing somebody sees should be the shiny new object to really catch their attention, so I think a page builder is important to have. One WordPress theme is fine for your course, because that’s your continuity thing, what people see after they’re a customer and a student, that’s your long term relationship. But in the beginning you want to make sure everything’s really eye-catching, and that could change over time when you want to test different things. So I was looking for a page builder as well, I think those two things are kind of what motivated me to look outside the WordPress ecosystem.

How International VAT Requirements Led to Taxamo

Chris Badgett: Let’s park it a little bit on the tax issue, because part of LifterLMS’s mission is we’re very global in nature, we invest a lot in translation, we have customers all over the world, and we’re really dedicated to serving the entire world. I know especially in Europe that tax issue is a big deal. For those of you listening, LifterLMS has an integration with WooCommerce, which is an e-commerce system for WordPress, and they have an integration through Woo with Taxamo and some other VAT solutions. So if you do want to keep it in WordPress, there are solutions out there that WooCommerce has figured out that LifterLMS can integrate with. But can you tell us a little more about the tax issue, and what Taxamo is?

Business to Business Versus Business to Consumer VAT Rules

Patrick Murray: Here’s the deal, taxes suck, but we’ve got to deal with it. For my normal business, if I work with another company, a business to business transaction, if it’s outside of Germany I don’t need to collect sales tax, there’s a paragraph that lets me skip it. But if it’s B2B inside Germany, like we’re both in Germany, then I need to collect the sales tax and pay it, and they can claim it on their end sometime later. So that’s business to business, you kind of have the option of how you handle collecting sales tax.

With business to consumer, when a private person purchases something from you, you always have to collect sales tax, and depending on what country they’re in, that’s a different rate. In Germany it’s 19 percent, in Sweden it’s 21 percent, so it’s a huge hassle. One of the things I used to do was say I only do B2B, so you have to give me a VAT number, otherwise you can’t purchase. That was one thing I did, and then in Germany, if you were in Germany, I had to collect sales tax anyway, but at least it was here in this country and I only had one rate to deal with.

Why the Seller Carries the VAT Compliance Burden

Patrick Murray: The problem is the burden is on the seller to make sure that the information you collect is correct. What I was doing with an app of mine a few years ago was just saying, you have to put in a VAT number, but I didn’t check it, so I wasn’t compliant. There are online services where you take that VAT number and the company name, you send it all off, you get a return, okay, that’s valid, it’s a huge hassle to do that. And the other thing is dealing with different countries with different rates. There are services you can connect with, but it’s the same thing, this web Frankenstein of services, how many different things do you want to deal with. You really want to keep it to a minimum.

How Taxamo Automates VAT Collection and Invoicing

Patrick Murray: That’s where Taxamo comes into play. They integrate with every one of my checkout pages, and it’s just a part of my checkout page, once I get everything set up. It looks at whatever the customer puts in, and it checks their IP address, which they have to do too, so if I’m in the EU I can’t lie and say I’m in another country to get out of it, it defaults to the IP address, and it takes the sales tax from that country and tacks it on the end. Then they have another service for automatic invoicing, it’s like 10 euros a month, and I do that as well, and the customer gets a PDF invoice with their address and name and everything on there, and the VAT, and actually the price at the end is in their currency as well, which is kind of nice for the customer. That’s Taxamo in a nutshell, it’s a very confusing topic.

Chris Badgett: We’re not accountants or tax advisors.

Patrick Murray: Exactly, I’m not an accountant, please talk to your accountant.

Filing VAT Through the EU Mini One Stop Shop

Chris Badgett: I have a question. Does that mean, when it comes to tax time, are you literally paying many different countries?

Patrick Murray: No, they have something called the Mini One Stop Shop, I don’t know where they got that name from, so it’s a MOSS report, and you fill that out quarterly, and that’s part of the Taxamo service. Then my accountant sends it off, so you have to register your company with this EU MOSS organization, and once you’re registered you’re allowed to pay them. If you’re collecting sales tax you have to make sure it gets to the right place, but it’s only one payment per quarter.

Why US Sellers Should Still Pay Attention to International Tax

Chris Badgett: In many ways, at least in online business, it’s still a little bit of the Wild West in terms of digital products. Countries haven’t necessarily quite figured it out, there are all these digital nomads moving around, and this new world with all these digital products, the industry needs a little more clarity, and nobody wants to do something that’s going to get them in trouble or come back to bite them later.

Patrick Murray: Governments are very slow to move, so it’s going to be like this for quite a while before they catch up, and by the time they do catch up with how internet business is done, it’ll be different by then. So I think this will be an ongoing thing, and I try to be compliant. Even if I lived in the states and I knew about this, I would really consider either blocking other countries or getting Taxamo involved, because Taxamo is really cool, it doesn’t do just the EU. They tell me when I might have a tax burden in the states, if a certain state I get a lot of sales in, they’ll send me a red flag and say, you’ve reached a limit here, you may want to check on this.

What Economic Nexus Means for Online Course Creators

Patrick Murray: Then it gets even more complicated, because if you have a nexus to a certain state, which means some kind of connection, and that connection could, they typically explain it as a warehouse, like I have a warehouse full of t-shirts in New York, and that’s where I ship from, so now I have a nexus to New York, and if I reach a certain threshold I have to pay collected sales tax. But the nexus can also be an affiliate, so if you started promoting my courses and they reached a certain threshold in your state, then I would probably have a burden to pay in your state as well. Again, I’m not an accountant. It’s extremely complicated, and you just have to talk to an accountant, that’s really the only way to be sort of safe.

Chris Badgett: Thank you for sharing your experience on that. For those of you listening, at some point you’re going to bump up into this issue, so it’s important to look at it, make decisions, keep checking in on the current status in the industry and the different country laws, and see professional advice.

How Taxamo Plugged Into Patrick’s ClickFunnels Checkout

Chris Badgett: So Taxamo was an option in ClickFunnels that you could check the box and turn on, basically?

Patrick Murray: Yeah, and they do a really good job with their integrations, like Stripe for example, it’s like two clicks and they do everything for you, you click a button, you log into Stripe, and then all of your shopping carts are integrated with your Stripe account. It was very similar for Taxamo, they made it easy.

Why ClickFunnels Is Not a Learning Management System

Chris Badgett: Let’s go back to your story. If you’re running a Facebook ad and somebody enters your ClickFunnels marketing funnel, gets a bunch of value in advance, and eventually gets to the bottom of your funnel, the conversion point, they enter their credit card, which is powered by the Stripe integration in ClickFunnels, and your tax situation is handled through their integration with Taxamo. You get a successful sale, this funnel software, these landing pages, these checkout pages, it’s not on your website, it’s on ClickFunnels.com, is that correct?

Patrick Murray: The checkout page is, and all the landing pages, that’s cloud hosted, so that’s on ClickFunnels’s site. You can register a custom domain, which I did, so sometimes you’ll see it switch really quickly from ClickFunnels to my custom domain, but it’s still hosted by them. I think it’s worth mentioning ClickFunnels does have a membership area, but it is not an LMS, it’s not a learning management system. I’ve purchased a few courses on ClickFunnels, and it’s really frustrating, because you go to this page and there’s no progress, you have to remember where you were.

Chris Badgett: There’s another wall.

Patrick Murray: Exactly, the information is great, but it’s not that learning experience. There’s a big difference between a pure information product and really this education thing, what Danny Iny talks about a lot, really making sure your students have success, and comparing it to a university, that there’s a staff there to support you, that’s why it’s so expensive. That distinction is really important, so they have a membership area that I don’t use, because I want to teach people for the long term.

Connecting ClickFunnels to LifterLMS With a Stripe Webhook

Patrick Murray: So that’s why I have everything in ClickFunnels for the marketing and sales, and I’ve got my learning management system in WordPress with LifterLMS. When you make a purchase in ClickFunnels, it’s connected to my Stripe account, because everybody uses Stripe to process credit cards almost, and Stripe can send out a webhook, and all that is Stripe sending a message to another website, and we use that to send a message to LifterLMS. I had Dennis create a plugin that can receive it, the plugin knows your Stripe secret key, and whenever a purchase is made on my Stripe account, it sends out a webhook to my LifterLMS site, it’ll create a user and register them in the course they purchased.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome, I just reposted that link. When Patrick mentions Dennis Hall, he’s the programmer and owner of LearningTemplates.com, and they make some amazing products that work with LifterLMS, and he’s got other products as well, but the ClickFunnels to Stripe to LifterLMS plugin, if you’re interested in that, I just reposted a link there. Just to be clear with everybody listening, that’s why I was asking, ClickFunnels is somewhere else, even if you do a custom domain, you have the challenge of the sale happening on a different website than where the LMS is, so how do you make them talk together. You built that bridge through webhooks and that plugin you can get over at LearningTemplates.com. I think it’s also important to mention there’s also a plugin that goes directly from Stripe to LifterLMS without ClickFunnels, and that’s helpful if you’re ever selling somewhere else besides your WordPress website that has LifterLMS installed with Stripe, you can do exactly what we’re talking about here with just that Stripe to LifterLMS plugin. But if you’re using ClickFunnels, which has Stripe for credit card processing, that’s what we were originally talking about here.

Patrick Murray: The actual connection is from Stripe to WordPress, basically to LifterLMS, that’s where the connection takes place.

How Refunds Automatically Unenroll a Student

Patrick Murray: It works both ways. If you click refund in Stripe, then the user will get deregistered from the course. It won’t delete the user, but they won’t be enrolled in the course anymore.

Patrick’s One-Time Pricing Model

Chris Badgett: What is your pricing model? Are you doing a one-time payment, a payment plan, monthly? Are you offering several options, or what?

Patrick Murray: My courses are a one-time fee. It just seems like a fair way to do it, one time, lifetime access. When I started with this, there’s a lot of courses about teaching courses out there, and it all seems very sketchy sometimes, so I’m really conscious of not coming off too salesy or pushy, and I really do want to help people. I want to change my day job, but I don’t want to change it to something that causes more stress in my life, I want to get some kind of enjoyment out of it, and when I help somebody, that’s the coolest thing in the world. So until I find a way of continually providing some information or being helpful for a monthly fee, I haven’t figured that out yet. I can imagine that over time I’ll structure things together, you purchase a course, I keep in contact with you, maybe 30 days later I introduce you to the next course, one thing builds on top of the other, so at some point you’re kind of like a university that has different classes, and if you’ve taken this curriculum then you’re certified, whatever. That’s kind of what I have in my head right now, but I’m letting it develop as it comes.

Deciding When a Custom Integration Is Worth Building

Chris Badgett: Let’s talk about the story where you hit a wall in terms of what the tools do out there. You’re like, okay, I like ClickFunnels for my funnel and selling, I like LifterLMS for the LMS, but I need to connect them, and the solution literally didn’t exist, so you built it, and you didn’t do it alone. How did you figure out it was worth doing, and why did you decide to pull the trigger on building a custom solution?

Patrick Murray: The idea is because I’m a programmer, so I understand how all these things fit together, and I’ve also built products in the past that never really went anywhere, so I know how much time can be wasted, or at least well spent on a learning experience, on making something like this, if it’s not your specialty. WordPress is not my specialty, plugins not at all, so it was tempting to say, all right, I’m just going to learn it and write this plugin myself. It was really tempting, but I wanted to get these courses out there and be helpful, so that’s how I came to the decision of outsourcing it.

Deciding it was worth the money was just one of those things, I had some traction, I had sold a few courses already, and I think the amount of money I had already made on the courses was the same as what the plugin would cost, and I didn’t plan on stopping. So that’s how I justified it in my head, it wasn’t some kind of business degree type of decision, it was, well, I already earned that much money with it, and if I get this plugin, it’ll open up this whole new world of marketing funnels, and it can only go up from there. It has paid off, and in the first couple handfuls of sales the plugin was paid for.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome, it’s really important to recognize that and treat your business that way, sometimes you have to invest in building something custom, look at the economics of it, and take the risk, it’s part of doing business. I admire you for doing that, and I know that was probably easier for you to do as a programmer type person, since you kind of know how the industry works.

Patrick Murray: It was easy to talk to the developer, to talk to Dennis about it. When you’re outsourcing that programming, that’s the most difficult part, communicating exactly what you need. We had to have a few conversations, and he misunderstood me at first, or I didn’t explain it right, but then when we did get it right, the light bulbs went off, and he’s like, oh, that’s what you want to do. Because it really is, you’ve mentioned before, it’s just an entry in a database, you need a way to get somebody’s money and then create an entry in a database, those are the two things you need.

How to Brief a Developer Without Ambiguity

Chris Badgett: That’s a good skill to have, and I know Dennis over at LearningTemplates is good at this, and I know you’re good at this, and we do this all the time at LifterLMS, you have to build a bridge between the business or teaching concept and the development or technology concept, and it takes a conversation sometimes to really get on the same page. If I need this business outcome, or I need the students to experience this, how do we solve that problem with technology, and getting good at that conversation and asking the right questions.

One of my tips for people listening is having commerce, voice conversation is good, writing is really good too, because it forces clarity of thought. What exactly do you want to have happen, well, when a user clicks to buy, on payment success this happens on the LifterLMS website. For those of you listening, if you’re ever running a quote by a developer or agency, the amateur way to do it is to use the word etc in there, you’ve got to take the ambiguity out and get really specific. We call it in development a user story, and as long as we can get clear on the user story, as a user doing this in the system, this happens, then this happens, if you can communicate that way, that’s what you need to build that bridge to a custom development solution.

Patrick Murray: One thing I would add is to really try to distill whatever you’re trying to do down to just the most essential things, and plan on having a few runs. The first attempt should really just be super simple, maybe even just one button that sends hello world from one place to another. For us, that was just getting the Stripe webhook to talk to WordPress at all, just to get that communication down and see how it works, because when you do things like that you may stumble upon things you didn’t know about before, and it could change the path you take to get to completion.

Where to Find Patrick’s Tools and Recommended Links

Chris Badgett: Well, cool, I really appreciate you sharing your experience with us, Patrick, and anybody listening, we’ll be sending out a replay of this, so if you’re not here live that’s cool, you’ll have the same links to ClickFunnels and Patrick’s post about the four tools for online course success. We have one question in the chat, if anybody has any other questions, now’s the time to ask.

Patrick Murray: The question is, could you post the name of the tax calculator, it’s called Taxamo. I wrote a post yesterday about a lot of the things we talked about today, and that’s at LearnAVProgramming.com, and there are links to most of the things we talked about today. Just to be upfront, there are a lot of affiliate links in there. I know that could seem kind of icky at times, but it costs the same amount whether you use them or not, and if you find the information useful, it’s just a nice way to say thank you. My thinking on affiliate links has changed a lot, I think it’s a really great way you can share information for free and still maybe make it worth your time.

Being Transparent About Affiliate Links

Chris Badgett: Absolutely, affiliate marketing is a great thing. We do a little bit of it, we use WP Engine for all our web hosting, so when we recommend WP Engine we use our affiliate link, and we’re just being straight up because we love that product, we use it ourselves. Even with LifterLMS affiliates, I would rather pay people who are using the product to help spread the word than pay for paid advertisements somewhere else. I think affiliate marketing is a great thing to explore on both sides of it, whether you’re getting people into your course or finding other ways to generate revenue based on your recommendations.

Closing Thoughts on the Course Creator Journey

Chris Badgett: Patrick, I really want to thank you for taking the early evening with us here, coming at us from Germany, and sharing your experience with us. Thank you for adding to the LifterLMS community, and thank you for working with Dennis and rolling out that ClickFunnels and Stripe integration, that’s really cool, thanks for being a part of the community and all of that.

Patrick Murray: Thank you, Chris, it was a load of fun, it’s great fun to talk about this stuff. This whole online course journey has really been a lot of fun. I think it changes your personality a bit, because you have to share more, you’ve got to put yourself out there, so I think it’s a great thing for really anybody to just give a try. If you’re thinking about it, just jump in, there’s really not much that could go wrong.

Chris Badgett: Awesome, well, thanks again Patrick, that’s it for the recording, and yeah, we’ll have to do it again sometime.

Patrick Murray: Definitely.