Transform more lives in less time

Probably my favorite AppSumo product of all time, and I've bought a lot. Thanks to the team that works on this, I know a lot of effort and epic coaching background went into this.

Sometimes coaching software is needed to track students' progress. This app combines online teaching, videos, and tracking performance, which can be used in my business.

I think the deal is great, especially compared to other online course platforms. I like the idea of creating more engagement e.g. with smart docs, tasks, habit trackers, and the communication options.

The design could be more customized in the online course area, but it's ok.

What I found a bit confusing was the fact, that it's not possible to just create online courses and sell them. You always have to create a program and there create the online course. Maybe it's because the idea is to focus on coaching and not on online courses, so tasks etc. are included.

This app looked great. But they keep adding appointments to my calendar to learn how to use it. And no matter what I do, these appointments keep coming back onto my calendar. I keep declining, declining all future events, etc. MAKE IT STOP.

I got a refund on a product I wanted to use because this "onboarding" was so intrusive. I literally in actuality lost client time, because they show up as an accepted appointment on my calendar. Nothing makes it stop and this has been going on for months. Every Wednesday and every thursday, a new appointment shows up. AND I CANNOT EVEN SEE WHO SEND THE DAMN APPT. I coach apps, this is simply the worst customer experience I have ever had with any app of any kind. Unbelievable.

Potential - BUT!!!
The Problem is: Terms of Service - Intellectual Property Rights
I basically wanted to transfer everything I do in 1 to 1 coaching and group coaching to UPcoach. I see that there is great potential here. I haven't had much contact with the support myself, so I can't judge it. Since I wanted to get at least one more full stack for other areas of my business, I came back to appsumo and read the reviews. With shock I became aware of what is written in the "Terms of Service". What is written there actually makes it impossible to use Upcoach. What other users have already told here has not been changed or adapted as of 25 January 2023. I have either developed many of my courses myself and put decades of research work into them, or I have learned the knowledge in dozens of sometimes cost-intensive courses. I have also licensed material for thousands of dollars. I have no desire to simply transfer my material without restriction and without compensation to a company as it is written in the "Terms of Service". In the case of systems licensed to me and in my name, I could not grant a right to third parties. This means that I cannot use it on Upcoach either. What scares me even more is that even sensitive data I receive from my clients is not protected. Basically, Upcoach could use all the material without me knowing that they are doing it and secondly, I would have no way to stop them. It is not possible to protect my clients' data in this way. I would also not be able to delete this data once it is in the system at the request of my clients. So really? How is a business owner, coach or the like supposed to build a trusting business relationship with these "terms of service" here? This is not how Upcoach is to be used for me. I give 2 stars for this reason because I hope that this will be improved. However, the system deserves 0 stars because no sensible person and owner can accept these "Terms of Service". I have never found such conditions on a platform and really wonder what this is all about. Please Upcoach Team I would like to give the opportunity here for the upcoach team, especially the managing director or owner, to comment on this. If upcoach becomes usable for me, I will gladly increase the star rating, but this is a waste of money.

I popped in here to upgrade my original purchase as I am very happy with the Upcoach software and the support their team provides.

I use the chat box to ask my questions. Responses are not instant but they do come back fairly soon and they are always friendly and helpful. I've had good help from different people there and Burak even made a couple of Loom videos suggesting good ways for me to structure my program).

The weekly calls are late for European time so I watch the recordings and ask my questions though the chatbox. The Q&A calls are so interesting as I can learn from others and see how they are structuring things in their programs. They're also quite fun as the host always keeps things light.

There have been product updates since my original purchase so the software definitely continues to improve. The 'Habits' feature is the reason for me switching from an LMS training software and I'm really looking forward to being able to scale up from one-to-one training/coaching to impactful group programs thanks to the Hbits feature, the community and other features.

Time for my review after 6 months of regular - day-to-day use of Upcoach.

To say it's the best platform in the world is a huge exaggeration.

It does its job to a certain extent, but falls short in many ways. Those things might be a stop show for some people... luckily I've been using upcoach on a small scale project, so no huge situations. However, I would probably not use it for anything larger, where automation and depedability is required.

What I LIKE about upcoach:
- relatively flexible and easy to use
- simplicity of design
- good structure - programs and courses
- ability to edit text, format it in many ways
- embeding HTML - works pretty well, but would rather see more options for native video embedding
- habits function - one of the main things that convinced me to buy... it's pretty good and would miss this should I move to another platform

What doesn't work:
- cannot see exactly where someone is in terms of individual course - which lessons they skipped.. only the % of the whole they've done
- lack of ability to change blocks to one's desire - size, etc - some items are changable, some aren't
- support - keeps coming back with canned responses, no real respect for your true issue.. no real intent to deliver beyond or even within the scope of question
- 3 admins is a joke if you want to run a bigger organisation (canned response expected here from the team, yeah!)
- support - bugs that have been reported months ago still have not been fixed
- support - they will keep asking you to provide a video showing the error, even though you've described it in every possible, minute detail.. and then when you submit the video - nothing will happen with that bug!
- Support- they also pride themselves on offering zoom calls with the owner (their line: noone in the industry does it - hmmm... ok) - but if you live in Europe, these calls are at 11pm, which is definitely not the time most people are willing to go on a zoom call... watching recordings is their solution... but maybe i want to ask questions? Oh well..
- bugs: website freezes on certain actions, such as text editing
- bugs: cannot edit certain elements, where I'd imagine it should be possible
- lack of updates - even though upcoach pride themselves on a huge number of updates, these things are usually not what I need and not as frequent as portrayed.
- lack of updates - the "coming soon" section in their modules has not changed since I joned in August 2022 - so basically for 6 months.. things such as Stripe, menu... not to mention not being able to integrate upcoach with most mailing platforms, only convertkit, which may work for some, but not for most.
- automations - poor selection - only 4 triggers and basically one action - email+ delay.. or add to convertkit (not an option to us), cannot change automation's name, once it's been chosen
- etc - out of available space here...

OVERALL - STRONG 3 TACOS - if things don't go the right way very soon, I will be moving to another platform

Upcoach could be such a perfect solution for coaches and I really wanted to love it, but there are unfortunately several downsides:

- they are potentially selling your content and data
"In addition, when you submit, email, text or deliver or post any material, you are granting us, and anyone authorized by us, a royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, unrestricted, worldwide license to use, copy, modify, transmit, sell, carry-out, create derivative works from, distribute, and/or publicly perform or display such material, in whole or in part, in any manner or medium, now known or hereafter developed, for any purpose."

- it is not possible to delete user, e.g. in many countries you can not use the software in a compliant way

- the platform is buggy

- the support is not really interested in solving problems

I was super excited about this because I have tried most of the tech tools out there (MemberVault, Kajabi, Teachable, Podia, Acuity, Satori, and more) and never found anything I truly liked that was designed for coaches (and also not super expensive.)

After hearing from other coaches about this platform, I grabbed the AppSumo special and gave it a whirl. It seemed to check a LOT of boxes, and so I decided to start using it for my group program that was launching a few weeks away. I began migrating my course content and setting everything up, and that's when I started running into issues.

There's a ton of basic functionality that just isn't there, (like the ability to view or edit past meeting agendas, keep notes of client sessions, take payments, copy parts of a course without glitches and bugs...) I was constantly messaging their support reporting bugs and asking for help.

Anyway, this went on for a couple weeks when I noticed that they only allow you to deactivate a client record, not delete it. So this was a huge red flag for me, and I started digging for their privacy policy, data policy and other information to find out how they are using the data (both what my clients are entering in the community forum, and my course content) What I found was that they don't have a data agreement in place. They could not answer my questions about why you don't own your data, or why client accounts can't be deleted (this is in my contract, I only keep records for 6 months) or what they are doing or plan to do with the data.

Luckily I was able to get a refund from Appsumo and close my account with them. I wanted to share this because if I had known this in advance, I'd have taken a hard pass on this company. In their terms and conditions, it states that THEY OWN YOUR DATA. Including your course content.

Upcoach gets a big fat F from me on privacy, functionality, and transparency. No thanks.

I've invested in this to go away from using a standard course platform and to use something more personalised with more functionality for my coaching business. So far, the experience has been amazing. It's easy to use, lots of cool things to use and the training is really helpful. I'll keep testing but so far it's looking really promising.

I got it thinking this looks cool. Then I started using it with clients and they loved engaging through a platform like this. This is totally changing the experience of my group coaching clients. It's a really well-thought through platform. It's making me look a lot more professional and organized. I had my program and course built out with the first lesson in one evening with the first client giving me feedback. A really short time to value. Looking forward to see how much more I can offer my clients with Upcoach.

Upcoach is no Kajabi or Thinkific killer. It was not designed to be. We will have to move past the Alternative to 'Kajabi, Teachable, Wordpress' copy here - Upcoach is on a completely different vertical as well as level.

And I love it.

I am a faculty at a medical school as well as the director of education technology at a high-ranked University and we have experimented with every platform out there. We currently use Canvas LMS (and Moodle for some).

Current LMSs on the market are geared towards enrolling huge numbers of students and as much as possible, automating the process so that the students are delivered lessons, assignments and assessments towards completion.

Here is a statistic that does not get discussed outside academia much: Hardly 3-5% complete courses. And there are tons of free courses available - top quality too. Most sites require payment only for certification and not for the courses themselves.

Imagine if you are a teacher and wish to monetise your teaching. You need to offer good value that people will actually. pay you for and your course needs to be engaging enough that they complete it.

Enter: Mentoring mode. Instead of capturing videos and creating a course that 'drips content' or set on auto-pilot mode, closer interactions, community building and hand-holding are gaining importance.

Here is where Upcoach shines. Not only does it have fantastic course editor / content authoring tools better than most LMS - Kajabi has a VERY POOR Course Editor, upcoach is designed to bring in the human element - that of mentoring and coaching, personalised attention, habits-building, etc.

Its clean interface, habits tracker, smart docs set it apart and the potential uses of these, combined with good quality content excite me with possibilities. I am personally looking to use Upcoach to help students requiring additional academic support in certain challenging areas where this platform will help me 'coach' the students individually till they overcome their academic impediments.

I also have acquired heartbeat - It looks fantastic to create learning communities. But upcoach is what I will use to deliver tailor-made, individualised, highly personalised, closely monitored, progress-oriented, habit-forming lessons.

Hope this helps.

What I would love to see:
1. Motivational tools: Gamification, Leadership Board, Badges (credly or badgr, etc) - experiencify.com does this nicely
2. Nicknames (Anonymous autogenerated ones like 'Green Unicorn' like in Kahoot, etc) will easily solve privacy issues at a lower level. Plenty of nickname generators are available, even powered by GPT-3 AI.
3. Some kind of Outcomes and Objectives matrix so that learners can see and track their progress. Rubrics might be a longer goal. E.g. We agree and set certain targets with the learners and define the milestones so that the coach-trainee can both see the progress.
4. Reminders and Countdowns, especially in the mobile app.

(Written on mobile)