A Journey from WordPress to Momen: How This Influencer Built an Online Course Website With Momen?
Introduction
Ever dreamed of a unique website where you're in control? Not just a standard template site, but a customized platform where you decide the features – from course watching to payments and member exclusives. Template-based builders are handy but often lack advanced functions like monetization, leading to the need for extra tools or paid plugins.
Discover how Shiki switched from WordPress to Momen, crafting her site in just 10 days, unlocking a new level of customization and functionality.
Turning Passion into Profession: Shiki's Online Course Business
It All Starts From Interests
Shiki is a tech influencer with 150k followers. Her content is tailored for Chinese speakers from around the world, and she's a pro at using tools and Apple devices. During her exploration of tools, she realized the widespread need for tech know-how. Her interest soon evolved into a profession. She began her online course last year.
At first, she uploaded her videos and shared her expertise on YouTube. With her followers increasing, she decided to turn her knowledge-sharing into a real business. That's when she decided to launch her platform to sell her courses.
A Journey of Exploration and Challenges
When Shiki decided to launch her platform, she knew she needed more than just a simple blog website. She wanted a feature-rich site that could showcase her blogs and videos, allow her audience to purchase courses, access documents, use coupons, and even get member-exclusive access.
However, without any coding or website-building experience, she struggled and faced challenges in the building process at first. After experimenting with various WordPress plugins, switching between online course platforms, and seeking external assistance, she managed to build her previous website, but it came at a high cost and with low performance.
WordPress or Udemy? Neither is the perfect fit.
Limitations of Templates and Multiple Plugin Management
Recommended by her friends, she chose WordPress to build her previous site. As I mentioned before, while WordPress is great for blogs, it falls short in building a customizable website with native functions.
Shiki struggled to build her first website. Frustrated, she remarked, "I have to find a plugin for each function I want." She managed to create the UI in WordPress, but it was limited to displaying content. To sell her courses, she had to rely on the WooCommerce plugin, which only allowed her to list the courses in her store. She had to pay for an online course plugin called Thrive Theme to upload and showcase her courses in the online store. Then, she found out that she'd need to pay for another plugin just to offer discount coupons. She said, "The building process is not hard. The challenge is connecting the database and your frontend page flexibly".
Since she couldn't add functions on her native web, she could only achieve it via plugins. "Though plugins are easy to use," she said, "they come with a hefty price tag.". Those plugins could cost her hundreds of dollars. She even hired someone to host her website. However, the performance was not good, sometimes it could take more than 10 seconds to load a page because the website had too many plugins.
Couldn't afford the plugins, so she decided to use Udemy as her online course platform. While Udemy allowed her to upload courses for free and provided a platform for audiences to watch, she had no control over setting the prices, and every course was sold for $9.9. This limited her flexibility in pricing.
Impact on User Engagement and Workflow
Building a website based on multiple plugins and connecting with different platforms has an impact on user engagement and workflow. Her users have to navigate between different steps and platforms. For example, on Shiki's WordPress site, users browse blogs and access resources, but when they want to purchase courses, they are redirected to Udemy where they must create a new account and watch the course, while the course materials are sent via email. Shiki has received feedback from students saying that it's inconvenient to watch the course and access materials on different platforms at the same time.
This also put a damper on her workflow. For Shiki, she also has to manage tasks across different platforms. She needed to update the new content on her site built with WordPress, upload the videos on Udemy, and send the course materials via email -all from different platforms. If all of these are in one platform, she would just need to update some data in the database.
To have a customizable website and create a seamless user experience, Shiki turned to Momen.
Switch to Momen: An Ideal Choice for Customized Apps
All Native, No Plugin Handling
Introduced by an acquaintance, Shiki started her journey with Momen. With the help of Momen docs and experts, she learned how to build with Momen. Without previous coding experience, she built her website within several weeks, from frontend to backend. Her current platform built with Momen has achieved the all-in-one function.
The biggest improvement is that all her content has been integrated into one place. Her customers no longer need to navigate between different platforms, as they can now register, purchase courses, and access content using a single account.
What's even better, according to Shiki, "This is exactly what I want! My users can watch the course video at the top, and they can easily find the relevant material using the timestamp below." This helped boost her user engagement, something she couldn't achieve with previous platforms.
When she tried to use the WordPress plugin for online courses, she had to tediously edit and input timestamps separately, and then add another module for images. It was a repetitive and time-consuming process. However, with Momen, she can edit all the materials using rich text components without any extra plugins. This also makes her website load much faster than before.
In addition, using Momen's multi-frontend feature, Shiki created an admin dashboard for her website. This allows her to upload courses and articles on the admin dashboard and display them on the client side, using the same data source, achieving dual-end synchronization. Moreover, in the admin dashboard, she can also manage orders and conduct basic data analysis, providing better support for optimizing the website.
Any Functionality, Momen Empowered
Core features of Shiki's site:
On-site payment: Using Momen's integrated Stripe payment.
Account system: Built with Momen's login action.
Order verification: Pre-configure the verification code. If a user makes a payment elsewhere, they can provide the verification code to verify on the website.
Shiki mentioned that she can now create unlimited courses, set prices, and customize discounts according to her preferences. This made her customers purchasing experience smoother. Importantly, she does not have to pay any transaction fees to Momen, granting her complete autonomy over her sales and marketing strategies.
When asked one of the best things about Momen, she said: "Basically, you can add any functions you want as you spend some time learning how to use it." Without a single line of code, without extra payment, she can build and iterate her platform, customizing it to meet her needs. After she switched to Momen, she received good reviews from her users, who now enjoy a better experience on her platform.
Is It Worth It?
Shiki's site has been online for over a year, and in that time, she has gained about 1,000 registered users. The total cost for the year was $1,020 for Momen's Pro plan and $129.50 for computing resource add-ons (including 1,500 GB of outbound bandwidth and 100 GB of object storage).
It took her about 10 days to build this project. While it may not be as fast as WordPress, the cost efficiency, functionality, and performance are unmatched, allowing her to add any features she desires. For the same level of control, the time required to build with Momen is significantly shorter than coding from scratch.
Endless Possibilities with Momen No-code
Shiki's traffic sources and growth have been driven by the increase in private domain traffic and SEO strategies. What Momen brought to her is not just a website but endless possibilities. Shiki's journey with Momen has not ended; she is taking it to the next level by adding advanced features like distribution, AI customer service, and Mailchimp integration.
She mentioned that the best part is that she won't have to seek out other tools or external help for these functionalities. This represents a worthwhile return on investment. Shiki quickly mastered the basics of Momen in just one or two weeks, while earning approximately $60,000 over the following year, proving that the return on investment is definitely worth it.
