Thomas Gobeaux

MO Which aspects of Ontraport do you think are most useful or underrated?

TG Membership sites give my clients’ businesses a portal that allows them to deliver their paid content, get feedback, organize events, sell products and services or let their customers manage themselves with self-support. It used to be very hard and costly to build those systems but Ontraport really has given small businesses the capacity to set all this up without the need for a dev team.

With a one-page template and the content ready, it takes less than a day to launch a new membership site. There is just no technological bottleneck with Ontraport Pages and membership sites, just a very simple yet powerful ecosystem. 

I've used Ontraport’s membership sites features to build business portals, both for a client's team and for the client's customers. Those portals allow them to save their staff a lot of time by giving them the few features they actually need to do their job and have their customers come back often and be able to serve themselves, saving countless human hours.

For example, a client had his customers going through a very long and lengthy onboarding process, with many steps, files to gather, etc. When he launched this as a succession of Ontraport Pages, it immediately became a support nightmare. I believe more than half of the customers eventually called him up on the phone.

So we worked on an onboarding portal where his customers could log in and go through the different steps at their own pace and in the order they wanted, like you would do during a PayPal identity confirmation process, for example. It’s all very neat, done simply using Ontraport conditional blocks to display where customers are at for each step.

Support on this is now a non-issue — this simple portal has saved a lot of human hours for both my client and his customers.

MO You have your finger on the pulse of the small business owner and entrepreneur. What gaps are you seeing? What's your advice for them?

TG I’m amazed that I still meet business owners making bank while taking orders with pen and paper. My advice to them is to please find yourself a trustworthy consultant to get you into the 21st century.

Relative to the Ontraport users, I think they should also get the help of a consultant, if only for an hour a week to bounce off ideas. If you find the right person, they can bring ideas from years of successful projects and show you Ontraport possibilities you couldn’t imagine. 

I may be preaching to the choir here but when I see a business owner spending two days building a thing I know most consultants could figure out and teach them in an hour or two, it breaks my heart.

MO As an Ontraport Expert, how do you ensure clients’ success and reinforce their decision to work with you?

TG As far as my own consulting business, I think it comes naturally from working closely with clients for weeks on end and slowly building that mutual trust and respect that comes with working toward a common goal. Before money is exchanged, though, I’m very generous with my help. Most of the people who have become clients did so because they wanted to build something far beyond their current skills. 

I just love going deep into problems with clients and coming up with solutions that fit their particular case. One service I provide is a simple 45-minute call with me on live screen where clients boot up their Ontraport account, explain things and we solve the issue they are having or do the thing they want to build right there and then.

Ontraport gives us the power to never have to say, “It’s impossible” to someone coming to us with a technical problem or to say it’s something that Ontraport won’t do. As clients request solutions, we have been adding them to ClickFix.io, which is available to all Ontraport users. 

It’s been a fun ride and we have very low churn, so I think people are responding to our “No problem is unsolvable” approach to things. 

MO What's next for you?

TG I’ll keep overdelivering for my consulting clients and for the rest of the time, I’m working on ClickFix.io to showcase the totally customizable interfaces people could build with the power of Ontraport, custom objects and ClickFix.io. I really want to see this type of system more often because it can really save hours and hours of menial work for some companies. 

MO Anything else you'd like to share?

TG To the Ontraport team and leadership reading this, thank you for kicking ass. There’s already nothing else like this out there as it is, and I can’t wait to see what awesomeness you’ll come up with in the next few years.