A lightboard, the Beta program, and the Agency Pilot

Agency

For those of you who are interested in learning more about agency, this is a new offering for us and it’s in between the developer plan, and the enterprise plan. What we’re doing with Agency is very similar to the Ltd that we did – we’re asking a certain number of people to to basically help us test out the new features to give us feedback, and to be patient with us, and also to help fund the development of this.

There’s three main components: –

• There’s the software itself
• There’s access – greater access to our team, to our training, access to materials and behind the scenes stuff that we do at GridPane.
• And then the third component is really partnership

What the partnership aspect is all about is that we have all kinds of people that come to us, and for example, they need development assistance on their websites, or they need somebody to completely overhaul what it is that they have, or they need somebody to build something for them from scratch etc. And while we have all of the necessary skills, we don’t want to work on those things.

What we want is a select number of agency partners, that we can say, “Oh, you need us to host your LMS for you. And you’re gonna have 1000 concurrent users? Cool, we can do all that bespoke engineering to build the infrastructure out and make all those things work. But before all that, you need to go and talk to one of these people that we’ve vetted as GridPane certified experts, and they will help you get across the finish line to then you can now host it efficiently on GridPane”.

The nexus of all of these things is what I would call scalable hosting autonomy. That’s what we’re building for agency users. That’s what we’ve been building all along. For people who selected enterprise. It’s sort of the marriage of these three things, you get, obviously, all the software that we have already that many of you have access to. But there are things like white labeling – this is something that previously has only been available in our enterprise plans that’s going to be available to these people that are signing onto Agency. There’s, there’s monitoring, there are all kinds of additional things that are bundled in with this entire offer that are software-centric.

But then there’s also all kinds of things like white labeling that some people don’t really care about at all, but they want access to the internal training. So we’re basically giving you access to exactly what it is that we show to brand new employees in support. And there’s other people that want behind the scenes access to us, okay. Some of the people that are in this want access to other people that are in the cohort – the component of people in the group who are going to be sharing with each other what works great for me in Indonesia, what works great for him in Australia, etc.

This sort of long term partnership, I think, is the most valuable aspect of this entire agency offering. And it’s priced at 50% off for life – all of the services, all of the extras, all of the capabilities like DevOps as a service, bespoke engineering, 50%, Agency plans receive a lifetime discount on all of these things. This is for those who want to be vetted partners.

And then overall, it’s for people who want to be able to leverage our name and co-brand, so you can go to large players and say, “look at this company that did the review signal on 2020, enterprise benchmark, look at all this capability. That’s what you get under the hood when you’re partnering with me, because I’ve partnered with them”.

So that’s sort of the broad strokes of what agency is, for those of you with serious shops that are buying dozens or hundreds of sites,  you should absolutely take a look at agency.

A few final notes: It’s expensive – it’s $5,000 a year plus additional fees, and so it’s not for everybody.

But for those of you, for example, who have already bought the LTD, you’re actually going to be able to apply that and get a 100% credit towards that fee. So if you’ve already paid save a couple thousand dollars for the Ltd, your first year is going to be reduced by that amount. And if for some reason next year, you decide not to renew, you don’t need white-label, you don’t want to be a vetted partner, you don’t want to be good pen certified, etc, etc, etc, then you can just fall back to the Ltd that you have, okay, by choosing this, you’re not getting rid of your LTD.

Interested?

If you’re sort of interested but you want to talk to. please email Shawn, our head of customer success at: shawn{at}gridpane.com. Tell him you’re “Interested in Agency” and he will get you on the schedule with either him or me or someone on the team, and we can answer any questions that you have. He can also send you a two page PDF that basically breaks down exactly what the offer is, as well as a sort of a top 10 on who is best suited to. 

If you just want in, you can email me directly and say “I’m in on Agency.” Myself or Carrie will follow up with you, and we have a couple more spots in this first cohort.

Wrapping Up

So hopefully that makes sense. So, first and foremost, definitely, please sign up for the beta. There’ll be details below here, you can reach out to us in the group, please don’t access support and be patient with us as we get you enrolled in this.

Anyone who wants to get on the beta please do. And again, it’s a beta. So don’t put your production sites right on it. The more people who are proactively participating in the beta, the faster all of these things become production features.

If you want all this hot stuff, and you’re on Pro, all you have to do is upgrade and you’ll instantly get access to all of these things. And for those of you that are sort of swinging for the fences and you want something more than than just that, feel free to reach out to us about the agency program. 

For Agency, we are planning on having another cohort that we will start in October. And then after these first two cohorts, agency will become a publicly available feature. It’ll be something that you can get month to month, but all of these added benefits and all of these extras and all of these lifetime discounts and all of these other things, those things are going to go away. This is a limited pilot program. Once we’re done with all the testing, once we’ve vetted this whole thing out, and we’re sure that everything’s working as expected.

For those of you that want agency capabilities month to month, you’ll be able to do so. Okay, so hopefully this makes sense. There’s something here for everybody. And yeah, I appreciate you taking the time. I look forward to speaking with you soon. Cheers.