Ignorance is bliss. For a while.
Meaning, sometimes you have a problem — a big problem — but you don’t realize you have that problem because you simply can’t imagine things being any easier than they are. You just accept the way things are and deal with it.
Take the famous story of patent attorney, Chester Carlson. It was the 1930s, and he was sure there had to be a much better way to duplicate documents than the lousy mimeographs and ditto machines (remember those?) everyone was using. That’s when he had his “photocopier moment,” proceeding to pour his heart and soul into a mix of electricity and powder technology that would eventually be introduced by Haloid Company…later known as Xerox.
Legend has it that before the photocopier’s introduction in 1959, when secretaries were asked if they would appreciate having a device that would enable them to instantly make copies of documents directly on paper, they wondered why they would need such a thing. Their duplicating machines were good enough, thank you very much — even though they were laborious to use and painfully slow, not to mention messy.
The photocopier was the answer to a problem they didn’t know they had. And it changed everything.
As did the telegraph, the telephone, the radio, and the television before then. As well as the fax machine, the personal computer, the Mac, the Internet, Google and the iPhone afterward.
Believe it or not, people used to get research done by going to the library and reading old documents on microfiche. We didn’t know it could be any easier. Now we have instant answers in the palm of our hand, wherever we are, and we can’t live without them.
Which brings us to the specific subject of this blog post.
Stumbling into the Digital Marketing Void.
Like many Internet Marketers, we too experienced the bliss that is ignorance. Well, it wasn’t bliss really. It was pain — but we were too ignorant to realize the pain — much like the proverbial frog in the pot of increasingly hot water on the stove.
That pain? Taming cloud marketing software to actually get business done.
Sure, cloud marketing technology (a.k.a. SaaS) has opened up a whole new universe of possibilities for us Internet Marketers. Now there are platforms for everything! Platforms for:
- Marketing pages and funnels
- Opt-in forms
- Product carts and checkouts
- Sophisticated email campaigns with automated marketing sequences
- Membership sites for consumers of our content
- Video hosting
- Helpdesks with ticketing systems
- Live chat to interact with our customers in real time
- Portals for managing affiliates
There are now platforms for every essential category of the marketing technology stack. With the proliferating plethora of platforms, you’d be forgiven for asking, “What void? Everything you need is out there!”
And paradoxically, therein lies the void.
There are so many platforms to choose from. But most of us just don’t have the time, the budget, or the technical background to piece together a complete business solution that just works.
Imagine having to heavily research multiple competing platforms in every category and hope you’re choosing the right one. Investing the time to learn and apply each platform in your business. Spending significant money on engineering to try to get these platforms to share data and analytics. And paying separate subscription fees for every single platform — fees that add up really fast.
Actually, you don’t have to imagine. This has been your reality for some time now, hasn’t it? And as frustrating as it can be, most of us simply accept it as the price of admission to all this wonderful technology that enables our Internet businesses.
Here at Genesis Digital, this situation breached our threshold of pain a little over two years ago. We witnessed so many of our fellow digital marketers struggling to make all this technology play nicely for them. Moreover, as we were growing our own business, we too were struggling to find the right combination of platforms to smoothly get things done — and that wouldn’t cost an arm and a leg.
We searched, and integrated and tested and did it all over and over again. But we kept coming up short. We had a big problem on our hands and no off-the-shelf solution to solve it. The void had gotten too big ignore.
That’s when we had our own “photocopier moment.”
Filling the Void
As the digital marketing world continued to soldier on, we suddenly had a crystal clear vision of the future — one with a platform that would harmoniously integrate all of the essential categories of the marketing technology stack into one easy-to-use, complete, and affordable solution that any Internet Marketer could use, no matter what stage of their business.
Armed with that vision, our experience in digital marketing, and our resources as a cloud software company, we began architecting and building an all-in-one solution in 2015. That’s when Kartra was born.
We talked at length with a good many of you to get a deep understanding of your needs. And as our prototype of Kartra started to take shape, we put it to the best test we could think of: running our own business with it. That proved to be a very effective way to quickly expose and fix deficiencies in the original design.
After a year-and-a-half of focused development, Kartra was solidly supporting our business. But to make sure it would meet the needs of many kinds of businesses, we entered an extensive beta phase in August 2017, opening the platform to hundreds of power users to test in their own companies. The feedback was immediate. Users like you expressed how eager they are for an all-in-one solution. This has been a welcome validation as we gear up for the public launch of Kartra in very early 2018.
Beyond The Void!
As we prepare to release the official public version of Kartra to you, we’re committed to more than simply delivering the software engine you need. We want to help you in every way we can to be successful with your Internet Marketing business. So we’ll be publishing a series of articles in this blog with stories, best practices and entrepreneurial advice drawing from decades of time spent in the digital marketing trenches.
Knowledge and wisdom are a two-way street though. We also need to hear from you! Sharing your experience and feedback will benefit the entire Kartra community. So please — share your reactions, your experiences, and your points of view here.
Together, we’ll uncover more voids we don’t yet know we have, and fill them.
Here’s to having many “photocopier moments” together.
And you are doing an amazing job of calming my brain down. I’ve NEVER had a tool in the 6 years Ive been marketing on the internet that made it so easy to sort the details of making it all come together. It’s the closest thing to paint-by-number…thanks Kartra Team!
Thanks Ed, this means a lot coming from one of our key beta testers. Thanks for all you’ve done to help make Kartra great!
When are you going live with Kartra? And how much is it going to cost?
Thanks for asking, Vincent! The plan is to go public mid-January 2018. You will have a choice of three investment levels, depending on your usage parameters – stay tuned! The best way to stay apprised of the launch is to get on the announcement list (which you can do from this blog) or join our Facebook page here: https://www.facebook.com/KartraOfficial/.
The Kartra marketing platform covering the void that some deem not so important IS important, love this article and can’t wait to test.
Hi Void! The ‘marketing void’ is definitely based on real-world experience. Glad you liked our article! And we can’t wait for you to test the platform for your business either! ;+)