Migrating from Gumroad to Podia (Is it Worth It?)

When Gumroad surprised folks with their substantial free increase by raising transaction fees to 10% of sales across the board, creators started looking for alternatives. We created a thorough and detailed guide on Podia, our digital products and favorite online course platform, its features, the costs, migrating from Gumroad to Podia, and the new and added features you’ll get.

What is Podia?

Podia is a platform designed specifically for creators to allow them to share and sell digital products they create. These products can be anything from online courses to digital downloads, communities to webinars, and even one-on-one coaching built around a single idea or topic. Podia allows creators who want to sell online courses to build a website with a clean, professional look and feel.

Podia is the best platform for creators for five reasons:

1. Zero transaction fees for paid plans. Podia never takes a cut of your sales on paid plans. Never pay a transaction fee again! (High volume sellers, we see you!)

2. Instant payouts. As the payment processor, Podia disburses your money as quickly as it can, ensuring you get paid on time and regularly.

3. Bundles. Create a product bundle with your webinars, digital products, and courses to sell for one price.

4. Take advantage of a high-conversion-rate checkout process. Podia’s checkout flow takes less than 10 seconds to complete, turning more potential customers into actual customers.

5. Unlimited in all the ways that matter. There’s no ceiling on the number of online courses, digital products, digital downloads, webinars, or coaching slots. Podia also has no limit on the number of customers you can have or the number of videos in each of your courses. When you take advantage of their email marketing features, there’s no limit on the number of emails you send.

Using Podia to Sell Online Courses

Podia is the best platform for selling online courses for creators with its lack of transaction fees and a few notable features:

1. The ability to pre-sell online courses. Build hype and take your lead generation to the next level by allowing your clients to pre-purchase your course, perhaps at a discount, before it launches.

2. Upsell customers into higher-priced options. Use a price anchoring technique to offer multiple plans that help the highest margin options stand out as the best value.

3. Drip content for release in phases, keeping customers engaged. You can take the Netflix approach and set your entire course live at once or release it in pieces, keeping your customers engaged over a more extended period.

4. Offer coupon codes to help win potential customers that would have otherwise churned. Some folks need a bit of convincing. Offer them a unique coupon code for a discount to turn their waffling into a sale.

5. Offer payment plans for customers who want to consume your content but cannot afford it all at once. For those with higher-value online courses, allowing customers to split the total cost into multiple, smaller payments can bring in those who may not have all the funds at once or may have a stricter budget for discretionary spending.

6. Bundle and sell online courses together to offer multiple products for one price. If you have multiple online courses, offer them as a bundle for one price, creating value and a better deal overall, bringing in additional customers who may not have spent money on a single course.

Using Podia to Sell Digital Products

Podia is the best platform to distribute your content if you’re a creator selling digital products.

1. Sell anything. There’s no limit on the digital goods you can sell: ebooks, PDFs, video and audio files, text content, or anything someone can download to their computer.

2. Perfect for lead magnets. Use free downloads to collect email addresses, build your mailing list, and upsell to paid content.

3. Offer coupons. Use discount codes to convert customers who might be on the fence about purchasing your content.

4. Restrict access to content using license keys. Take advantage of Podia’s license key functionality and control who can download your products.

5. Upsell products. Bump up the size of your orders by adding additional upsells.

6. Bundle and sell digital downloads together to offer multiple products for one price. If you have multiple downloads on offer, package them as a bundle for one price, creating value and a better deal overall, bringing in additional customers who may not have spent money on a single course.

Using Podia for Communities

If you’re building a community, we think Podia is the best platform. Here’s what makes Podia stand out:

1. Connect your audience and your content. Operate your digital products and online course business in the same place and in the same way as your online communities. Keep everything together and easily organized.

2. Take advantage of an all-in-one platform. Podia is your all-in-one platform for your community, courses, digital products, payment processing, email marketing, and more.

3. Your customers will have a single login. Any of your clients who have purchased your digital download and course content will also use the same login information to access your community.

4. Podia is creator-friendly. Don’t piggyback off some other service where the community is an afterthought, and selling ad space and eyeball time means more than thoughtful interaction.

5. Create engaging topics. Use your community to create topics of conversation that engage your users and keep them coming back to learn and chat with you and other community members.

6. Create those sweet posts, comments, and likes. Like Facebook Groups and other bloated community platforms, use your Podia community to engage your audience; create posts and comment on others, and allow your community members to do the same for back-and-forth engagement.

7. Moderate your content and restrict access. Decide which members can see what content, create new posts and more.

8. Know your customers and community members. Your customers are your customers. You’ll have full access to your customer and community, including their names, email addresses, and products purchased.

Using Podia for Webinars

Sharing information with large groups of people usually involves a webinar. Podia is the best platform for selling access to webinars (or giving access away). Here’s why:

1. Integrate with YouTube Live and Zoom. Meet your audience where they are and offer your webinars on both YouTube and Zoom.

2. Stop relying on YouTube. Require your attendees to sign up via Podia, keeping your customers yours and closing the loop on future customer value and product offerings.

3. Charge money for your webinars, or don’t. Sixty dollars, six dollars, or zero, the choice is yours. There’s no requirement to charge money.

4. Offer a presale and schedule a go-live date. Pick a date to go live, and offer your clients a means to pre-purchase access ahead of time.

5. Replays make money, too. Podia keeps a copy of your webinar to be replayed. Sell access to webinars after the fact and earn income from those who couldn’t attend the live session.

Using Podia for One-on-One Coaching

Your time is valuable, and while you could set up an entire e-commerce platform or store to sell your time, we think Podia is the best platform to do so instead.

1. Sell your knowledge. We think one-on-one coaching is one of the best ways to take everything you’ve learned through experience and study and turn it into a business. Monetize that expertise and directly connect with your audience and your customers.

2. Integrates with popular scheduling tools. Connect your Podia account to the big scheduling apps, including Calendly, Acuity, YouCanBookMe, and SavvyCal. If you’d instead offer a link to your scheduling platform, you can do that, too.

3. Set everything up in minutes. Your payment, scheduling, and sales funnels all connect to one place.

4. Offer upsells, taking one-to-many relationships with customers one-on-one. Use Podia’s upsell functionality to take your one-to-many offerings like webinars and online courses and turn those into high-margin coaching calls, so both you and your clients succeed.

5. Add coaching as its module for your courses. When your students finish their course, they can book time with you immediately, lowering the friction to growing relationships with your clients.

Podia for Selling Physical Products

Podia was created as a platform to sell digital products like online courses and webinar access. Still, with a few tweaks and creative implementation of their digital product tools, you can also sell physical products to your customers!

The Podia help site goes into more detail about how to make that happen.

Podia’s Killer Features for All Creators

We covered what makes Podia unique and how its users can succeed with the tools at their disposal. Still, it’s worth covering a few extra tools and services Podia offers all of its users to help get the message out and spread the word about the content you’re creating.

Email Marketing

The key to any successful content creator is marketing. Utilize Podia’s email marketing tools and stay in constant contact with current and prospective students, let your clients know you’ve released new modules for your courses or an altogether new online course, announce a sale on your digital products, and more. Other platforms have basic email announcement functionality, but Podia offers a complete email marketing experience, saving you time and money.

1. Send broadcast emails. Let your entire list know you’ve updated something, or send emails only to specific segments of (prospective or current) customers.

2. Create automated email campaigns. Nothing beats a high-quality email drip to convert those on the fence into paying clients. Use drip campaigns to keep them engaged and turn them into clients for life.

3. Segment your customers. Categorize your customers, so you’re only sending the most relevant emails to specific groups of customers.

4. Open rates are great, but revenue numbers are better. You’ll be able to see how many folks are opening your emails, but seeing how helpful your emails are at converting into actual money will take things to the next level. See the associated revenue figures for every email.

Messaging

One of the keys to offering a high-quality experience for your clients is supporting them without a support team. Podia’s messaging feature can help.

1. Interact with potential customers and close the deal. Get notified when someone’s just browsing your site and have the opportunity to interact with them. Answer their questions and overcome their uncertainties, turning a window shopper into a customer.

2. Chat with your customers. Be available to your logged-in customers and help answer their questions, creating additional value.

3. Offer a convenient way to get in touch. Your customers will have a way to get a hold of you when they need to, with minimal friction, wherever they may be.

4. Be helpful, even when you’re not around. Use chat messaging to take note of customer questions, collect feedback, and request new or updated content at any time.

Custom Web Site with Your Own Domain

One of Podia’s key features that all creators should take advantage of is being able to sell a digital product on their website. Having your products accessible using a custom domain under your control ensures your brand remains in your control, not in a third party’s hands.

Podia makes creating your website a step further and allows you to write a blog post and share it with your followers. Create follow-up content and free teaser information that end in a call-to-action for your online courses, digital products, webinars, and one-on-one coaching.

You’re given access to what, in total, amounts to an entire online store for your content and media. A central portal you control is your website with landing pages, marketing campaigns, blog posts, and more.

Your Own Affiliate Program with Custom Commissions

We think one of the keys to being a successful creator of online content and purveyor of digital products is having an affiliate program. Podia’s platform provides the infrastructure to create an affiliate program for you. There’s no need to partner with a third-party affiliate network and offer massive percentages of your sales to a network in exchange for new customers.

1. It only takes a moment to create your program. You can spin up your affiliate program with just a few clicks, and no additional software is required.

2. Set custom commission levels. These are your products, your customers, and this is your program. Decide the commission rate for your products, or set one universal rate for everything.

3. Make your program public or invite-only. Choose whether every customer can be an affiliate or only offer the privilege to a select few.

4. Payouts are automatically calculated. Podia will do the hard part, figure out what you need to pay out to each customer, and take care of the work.

Embed Content on Other Platforms

It’s enough that Podia is an entire online platform to sell courses, but their third-party apps support is fantastic, too. You might already have an extensive setup on another service you’d like to keep operating. That’s great! Podia offers embeddable buy buttons, allowing you to capture traffic and convert visitors into customers without them having to leave your site.

Priority Support

If you’re a high-volume content creator or you have a large following, Podia created the Earthquaker plan just for you. In addition to having unrestricted access to every feature, Podia has a dedicated team of support staff exclusively for Earthquaker users.

Comparing Podia to the Other Top Creator Platforms

In the previous sections, we went through all of the features of Podia in detail and how they can benefit you as a creator, but we think it’s also worth making side-by-side comparisons with the other top platforms.

What is the Creator Friendliness Score?

A great way to objectively compare platforms for creators to offer their content and services is to look at their Creator Friendliness Index (CFI). On a scale of 1 to 100, the CFI measures how well the platform does in terms of offering high-value features for creators, the presence of free plans, how paid plans are priced, plan limits, whether one can migrate easily, and the quality and level of availability of the platform’s support team. The CFI’s list of 20 metrics is available on its website. Click here to learn more.

We’ve taken the Creator Friendliness Index score for each of the compared platforms below and ranked them against each other. Here’s how they stack up.

Creator Friendliness Score Comparison by Platform

You can check out more details on how the CFI score for each platform was decided here.

Podia vs. Gumroad Vs. Thinkific Vs. Teachable Vs. Kajabi

With the massive increase in transaction fees, Gumroad’s lack of features catering to content creation becomes a glaring omission when looking at other platforms. Podia’s dedicated content course builder and transaction-free selling experience make Podia a clear choice.

Migrate from Gumroad to Podia

It can be difficult and time-consuming to migrate your content library from one platform to another. Podia is so confident you’ll enjoy their platform that when you sign up for a year, Podia will migrate your content for you, 100% free. Admittedly we buried the lede, but that’s it. There’s very little work for you to do!

To take advantage of Podia’s free migration and get the process started, you must sign up and fill out their migration form. Podia staff will get in touch and tell you roughly how long it’ll take and if they need anything from you.

Podia Pricing

We think Podia’s pricing is incredibly competitive. Let’s break down the various pricing plans and what you get.

Podia’s Pricing Plans

All of Podia’s plans can be had as a monthly subscription. Their annual plan, however, is where the real value is and comes with free migration from Gumroad.

Podia’s Transaction Fees

Podia has zero transaction fees for all its paid plans, unlike other platforms. Podia’s cut never goes up, regardless of how much money you make. They’re only compensated based on the plan you’ve chosen.

Podia’s Pricing Philosophy

After news broke about Gumroad increasing its pricing dramatically, Podia created this video explaining its pricing philosophy and why they think pricing matters when supporting creators.

Recap

You have a wealth of knowledge you’d like to share with the world, and get paid doing it. It only makes sense then to make sure you’re using the best platform to market, sell, and present that knowledge. Podia is our favorite platform for content creators to create courses, sell digital products, and offer their one-on-one coaching sessions with clients. Prices are competitive, and the features available on each of the plans make it a solution you’ll grow with for years to come.