How To Decide What Software Is Right For Me

How To Decide What Software Is Right For Me

Welcome to another episode of what word Charlotte do. And today, I am talking about software.

Something that I get asked a lot is How To Decide What Software Is Right For Me. I’m creating a new offering, and I’m creating a membership. What software suits me best? And this is a really not difficult question to answer, but it’s an answer that many people aren’t expecting. And I always say, when it comes to software.

Don’t run before you can walk

The reason I say that is because in order to choose software. You need to be clear on your model you need to be clear on the objective. And you need to be clear on the deliverability of that particular offer. Although you might say, Well, I know that I want to create a membership site. The thing is here. There are so many different elements to this a membership site can mean so many different things to so many different people.

Although you might be thinking that’s what you want to create.

Once you start creating it. The majority of the time, you end up going down a bit of a different road. Because you might be pre-selling and you might be getting feedback and you might see these other things and you might think well actually, this works a bit better if we do it this way.

So, what I always say, is to make sure that you are completely clear on that offer, you’ve started to create some stuff, or you’ve got existing stuff that you’re going to recreate, you’ve got that mapped out. I generally say to do all this in a Google document or Word doc, and just make sure that you’ve written out the content, or you’ve, you’ve had the content, transcribed. whatever, you choose. Make sure you have that in a document.

That way, you can see, what, where you’re going to go with this offering.

You can get really really clear on what you want it to be you can be really really clear in what you want it to provide to your audience and your customers. And therefore, you can then see what you need from the software. But when you’re choosing software don’t just think about the now, which many people do, think about where you want the software to be.

So once you’ve started to create it, you’ve got a clear picture of how you’re going to deliver it. And how you want your customers to sign up. How you want the community to feel how you want the community to be hosted. All these other different things that often people think about once they’ve chosen the software and started to create some staff.

So it ends up becoming overwhelming

To then think, this isn’t the right software for me, and they either want to migrate or they feel disheartened. Because they’ve got a piece of software that’s not going to work with them for what they need and want. So, once you are clear on that and you can see what you need from a particular piece of software for the future.

So, where you want this to be you can then start to whittle down all the different software’s that are out there because believe me, there are so many.

And, yes, you need to take budget into account here, I completely get that.

But the problem is if you take budget into account and that’s what you do too much and that’s what you make your decision on what will happen is you will go on to this software that is okay for now but actually in a month’s time or six months time. It’s not really going to be fit for purpose. So what you then have to do is spend days, migrating over to another piece of software or you need to pay someone to do that for you.

So, actually, are you saving money by doing that?

I’m not convinced. So make sure that you are making the decision based on where you want this to be for at least the next couple of years because sure you can change. Change software that is fine. But the last thing you want to do is to choose a piece of software because your friends said that that software is really good, or someone over here has said, oh no this software is really good I wish I’d had that earlier.

Whereas actually business is not a one size fits all software, and you need to make the decision based on what you need and want for your business. not what other people want for their business.

So make sure that you are choosing the right reasons

Yes Take budget into account but don’t make that the sole decision-maker. Look at your integrations What do you need this software to integrate with how you going to deliver to your customers so do you need a particular piece of software to integrate with this piece. What does that look like?

And by creating your new offer in a document, it means that you actually have a backup which I always, always say, I really really believe you need to have a backup of everything in business and, you know, that’s because even if you’re saving your documents on your drive your cloud drive. Are you backing that up.

Are you being compliant with GDPR Why are you doing so. But are you backing up your course content, are you backing up everything else in your business, your email it everything, Because ultimately, errors happen. And the last thing you want is all your work to just disappear.

What about if that piece of software isn’t there tomorrow you. It’s gone

So you need to make sure that you are backing up your work, and this is one of the really good benefits of doing it this way where you’re creating it on a document because you have that there and you have the backup there. So if anything ever happened you know that you have that to be able to put yourself back into the position that you were already in.

I hope that’s helped, and I know it’s not probably the answer that you were expecting. When you came on to this video, or, or content, and I completely get that, but I also want to be completely honest with you.

I will give you my recommendations and the tools that I love, but ultimately you need to be the one that’s making the decision about what one is right for you

And the only way you can do that is when you know where you’re going and where that offers go. I also wanted to add a little something. And that is, people are so afraid of tech. And I get it. If that doesn’t come naturally to you. It is going to scare you. But what I want you to remember is most software’s out there are made to be user friendly.

They’re made for people not to know how to use that software, and to be able to come in and do it yourself

So, ultimately, although I know you might be thinking, I need an expert that’s going to be in this piece of software. You actually you can hire someone to do that for you. Certainly, but ultimately you want to know what that tool is capable of, because the last thing you want to do is to bring in this expert on that particular software, they can do the content do whatever they need to do, but actually then you think, oh, it’d be really good to add this to it.

And then you get told no that piece of software can’t do it. And that that’s where I really believe that you need to have some idea of the functionality behind software’s before you make the decision to go ahead and sign, sign up, and I don’t want you to be afraid of tech is something that you, you can pick up everyone can pick up.

What’s the worst that can happen?

If you have a backup of your content and okay you might send a rogue email. Say sorry. It’s not going to, I don’t want it to scare you. Like I see it scare a lot of other business owners, so I just wanted to add that bit to the end to just say, don’t be afraid of tech and when you’re choosing software. Don’t procrastinate because you’re worried about how easy it’s going to be to pick up, because as I say, most of these tools are created for people to be able to easily pick them up.

I hope that has helped you with the question How To Decide What Software Is Right For Me.

Want some ideas with software to compare? Get in touch and see if we can help.

How To Decide What Software Is Right For Me

How To Decide What Software Is Right For Me