Inside my Hiiv-Part 1: How did we get here?

Handmade Seller has been on a journey to modernize our infrastructure for the magazine. Normally talking about your systems and processes can feel like watching paint dry. Who wants to talk about this stuff, right? This isn’t the sexy marketing and sales stuff. It’s just the critical, my business dies without it stuff. And after some big problems with our infrastructure, Mr. HMS and I did this within 6 days.

As I have talked with other business owners and friends, I keep hearing that the story of what we went through would be VERY interesting for people- if I was willing to share. How often do people share the inner workings of how they made a decision and how it turned out?

As a business owner, it can be hard to admit our businesses have issues. There are already so many situations where we may feel judged or be criticized for what we do or do not do. Opening up and saying “My baby is ugly” can be very tough for many people.

But you know what this process has also taught me? When presented with an honest and authentic explanation for what’s happening- people can be unbelievably kind. And they don’t feel quite so alone when their systems aren’t perfect. Plus, they already knew your baby was ugly. They were just too afraid to tell you because they like you and are not sure if you know! See, we can all laugh about it now. Yes, I knew I had one seriously ugly baby. But she is so much prettier now!

Why share this story?

For me this journey is very recent, but there are several reasons why I want to get started on sharing this:

1. It is really hard to look past marketing schtick to understand what might work for you (or might not). Particularly when it comes to software. Most of us have learned to be skeptical of marketing. Artisan businesses tell me they want the real information, the practical stuff. The how did you actually do it stuff. Not the hand wavy it will all be okay magical mumbo jumbo. I want to share what’s working for me.

2. Content creators or niche print and digital media companies need genuine solutions for their content challenges. A LOT of us were/are on old cobbled together infrastructures held together with duct tape, baling wire, and prayer. I see MANY practical applications of this product for different segments of the craft and creative industries. Most importantly, its about making sure we are giving our customers solutions that meet them where they are an in how they want to consume content.

3. I think this Beehiiv product is really interesting. I spent over 20 years as an analyst on big ERP systems prior to running the magazine. I’m used to making the elephant dance so to speak. I think I have come up with some clever ways to engineer and set things up that might make this journey easier for others that are interested. It will definitely give you things to think about.

4. I’m off that old infrastructure that was giving me trouble, and we have it shut down. So I feel pretty safe to share this because so much of this is in the rear view mirror. And it is working a lot better now.

The reality of my magazine set up

A number of the pieces of my infrastructure were inherited when I bought the magazine. I ended up bolting on a series of additional products so that I didn’t have to replace the core product for my business (my website). In the day to day rush to get projects done, and get things launched, we can end up appending on solutions. Do you ever find that once you have something working you are hesitant to tear it out? It becomes the devil we know, and we just adjust our timelines and schedule to account for that extra time.

So what was I using before and why?

WordPress ecosystem

I used a number of products in the WordPress ecosystem, including WordPress hosting, Elementor, JNews, 3D Flipbook, and a bunch of plug-ins. That was just to get the website to work. I inherited most of this part of the ecosystem. I was familiar with WordPress because I had used it a number of times before, so I was comfortable working in this ecosystem.

WordPress & a WordPress hosting company

WordPress was the key piece of infrastructure this was built on. WordPress is still popular as a content management system. My set up was pretty typical of a small company.

“As of November 2024, around 43.7% of websites use WordPress. In other words, two of the five websites worldwide run on the platform. WordPress’s market share is much larger—at 62.9%—if we only consider websites running on a known CMS. “ (Source:https://www.notta.ai/en/blog/wordpress-statistics)

I used WordPress to manage articles that I would post. I also stored all my magazine files as part of their media, and we integrated WordPress with ThriveCart for the magazine display and download. It was mostly just your basic website functionality.

Elementor

Elementor was the website platform I was using that sits on top of WordPress. 18 Million websites have been built using Elementor. It is very popular in the WordPress ecosystem.

Elementor is where I had to set up advertisements for sponsors and partners, and control different aspects of the layout for desktop versus mobile.

JNews

This was a theme that worked with Elementor and was also part of the WordPress set up. This controlled a lot of our menus, layout and navigation to make the website look like a media company. It had things like social sharing widgets and standard post templates for articles. It had desktop versus mobile set up for menu’s, etc.

3D FlipBook

This was a WordPress plug in that I used to display the PDF of our digital magazine for our readers. This allowed us to create a version of the magazine that people could flip through to simulate how it feels to flip through a physical magazine. Most magazine publishers have one of these types of products.

WordPress Hide Posts

This was a WordPress plug in used to hide posts from SEO and the main pages so that they could be shared with subscribers only.

A pile of plug-ins for WordPress

Yoast for SEO, WP Rocket to help with performance, Smush Pro to optimize images, and WP Mailer Lite SMTP plug-in to send emails from the website. We also had a Security plug-in to attempt to block bots and other bad actors. Basically trying to harden WordPress a bit to keep it from getting attacked.

ThriveCart

I used ThriveCart products, ThriveCart Learn, and the ThriveCart affiliate program products. I originally used ThriveCart because it could essentially bolt on and extend my existing infrastructure. I also liked that I could buy the product upfront to manage my overall cost of the product. It met my needs to get started selling subscriptions again, even though the ThriveCart learn is not explicitly meant for the way I was using it.

ThriveCart was also the easiest place for me to see how many people looked at my products, my conversion ratios, and my revenue from subscriptions.

ThriveCart products

I used this to manage the landing pages for the subscriptions. I also used the products to sell some PDF copies of selective articles, as well as digital copies of the magazine. It also managed the funnel, the sale, and integrated to Stripe for payments. I had three primary subscription types:

Print, Digital, and archive: This was our magazine printed four times a year and sent to US addresses. This also gave access to be able to download digital copies of the magazine (as a PDF). It provided access to our entire back catalog as well.

Digital and archive: This gave access to be able to download digital copies of the magazine (as a PDF). It provided access to our entire back catalog as well.

Archive: This was read only access to our magazine. It used the 3D Flipbook plug in to display the magazine.

There was a lot of experimentation in those early days as I figured out what would be the most common subscription plans. I tried lots of things and learned a lot, and ThriveCart made it very easy for me to do this. I experimented with a mix of annual, semi-annual, quarterly, and monthly subscriptions as I learned. Annual plans were the clear winner when I was using ThriveCart.

ThriveCart Learn

Technically this is a product for courses. You create courses, lessons, and modules. I believe it was a relatively early stage product for ThriveCart when I started using it. I used it to control the release of magazine issues for subscribers. I was able to make it work for what I needed at the time.

As an early stage product, a lot of features I would have wanted were missing, which cost me a lot of time for admin. I had different “Courses” for different subscription levels, and I had to do a lot of copying and reformatting because the functionality was essentially non-existent to copy things nicely. As an example, it used to take me about half a day to get a magazine set up on ThriveCart to make sure everything was setup, formatted, working correctly, and tested. ThriveCart product purchases for subscriptions did set up automatically in ThriveCart Learn which was great.

I also used the product to create a mini-course called PR for Regular People.

ThriveCart Affiliate program

I had started experimenting with an affiliate program that I was able to set up in ThriveCart. This would allow me to have others recommend Handmade Seller magazine to subscribers. The program required me to use PayPal to manage payouts for affiliates. This also required some additional set up, and I only managed to get a couple people up and running on this. With all the other pieces I was managing, I never got very far with this. In this case to roll out the program, I would have had to build in whole pages and infrastructure on WordPress. There was just never enough time to build this much less roll it out to the audience in a way that would be easily understandable. For me, it was also a nice to have, so not critical.

Brevo (formerly known as Send in Blue)

When I first got started sending emails to the email list I inherited, I was working from a very large list. The email hygiene on the list wasn’t great though. Small businesses often come and go in this industry, and a lot of this list wasn’t very actively engaged.

I chose Brevo to get started after looking at a number of companies. Brevo made it pretty easily for me to set up forms within WordPress (with their Plug-in) so that sign-ups for the email list were pretty easy. I could create forms for different types of list sign ups, and easily integrate them into the site. The forms were not particularly pretty, but were functional. When you are doing some like embedding forms from one product to another, you naturally face some limitations.

I also used it to let people sign up for a free sample of the magazine, and used automations to send that out.

Within Brevo I could see if individual users were reading my newsletters. I could also see my overall metrics. But basic things like see what people clicked on required me to upgrade to a tier that was $40 a month more than what I was paying. So I had to stick to seeing basic metrics, which was a little frustrating. Have you ever found yourself getting set up on software and then finding things that seem pretty normal are just non-existent or require a lot more money? I think most of us have been there.

Zapier

After someone purchased a subscription through ThriveCart, we had to have a way to get them on to a list of paying subscribers in Brevo. We built an integration to take that information from ThriveCart and put it into Brevo. This was a simple way for us to make sure people were added to our list.

We used a Brevo plug in within WordPress to get free users on our mailing list.

Google Sheets

Every time we would get a new print subscriber, I would update their information manually into a Google Sheet, as ThriveCart didn’t store the mailing addresses (at least not in a way that I could figure out). So I kept track of the subscriber information for print when I order our print on demand quarterly magazines. I had to get this information from the copy of the receipt sent to the user and myself.

Stripe

I used Stripe to manage payments- pretty standard for payment processing.

We would also use one time payments in Stripe when we would sell physical copies of the magazine at trade shows we attend.

PayPal

PayPal was required in order to activate payments for the affiliate program for ThriveCart. I didn’t otherwise actively use it or have subscriptions running through it.

Google SiteKit

we used this to link together Google Analytics and Google Tag manager to Google Analytics.

Google Analytics

I was using a very basis set up for Google analytics to help me understand what countries my traffic was coming from. My top five geographies for visits are US, UK, Canada, Australia, and India. This generally accounts for about 90% of the traffic, with the rest from other countries around the world. Here is a map showing where we had traffic from in the preceding 30 days prior to conversion.

Google AdSense

I initially used Google AdSense to add paid advertising to the site.

Info-Links

This was a newer advertising product I had recently started using for some limited advertising as they worked primarily with a lot of publishers and bigger reputable brands (think like major soft drink companies and Consumer Package Goods companies).

Passionfroot

I used Passionfroot to give me a standardized way to present my media kit for prospective advertisers. They are a marketplace matching ad buyers with creators. They also managed the payment collection process. Initially they were a great source to find some new advertisers, but after they raised their latest VC round, things changed. The quality of advertisers went down, and it became a race to the bottom on price. But I did have their solution in place. It managed the sales process, but did not easily integrate into any other products.

And there you have it. 24 separate pieces to manage the basic website, marketing, and magazine subscriptions. To run my small independent magazine. awkward pause

Note, this is just the magazine part of the set up. I also use Zencastr for podcast recording, Google workspace and email, Canva, Publer for social media scheduling, and Cloudflare for DNS and domain hosting.

I also distribute through PressReader, Zinio, Magzter, Cafeyn and Amazon Kindle for additional exposure and marketing, although these sales channels are very small since there are almost no publications in our industry on these platforms.

Through all my various channels, the publication is read in over 24 countries around the world. My direct subscribers typically come from the US, UK, and Canada, with many other countries coming through the magazine distributors.

Let’s face it, there is a lot of tech for publications. Just writing all this is making me hyperventilate a little. I bet just seeing this list helps you understand how it was a struggle to manage it all?

In the next part of this story, I will talk about some of the business limitations that this set up was causing. And then why we ultimately replaced it in 6 days with the core infrastructure on Beehiiv.

PS- If I’ve made you curious enough about this, I’m sharing my referral link if you want to check it out yourself and get a 30-day trial + 20% OFF for 3 months.