Searchie

Searchie is what happens when an online course platform niches down to fill an important gap in the market!

Created by Stu Mclaren, a very popular creator and proponent of the membership model among other things, the company has come a long way.

Searchie started out as being known for its ability to make all of your video content “searchable”.

It now offers a fully fledged course building and selling platform to rival some other popular options such as Teachable, Thinkific or Kajabi.

Now, as a course creator, you have a lot of platform options to host your course on, and I’m sure you’re reading this review to determine whether Searchie might be it.

So let’s see exactly what it does, what’s possible and who this might be a better fit for.

Searchie is more of a specialist tool than jack of all trades!

Here is the gist of its feature list:

We’ll see a little later how this compares directly to other competitors, but for now let’s break down what these look like.

Searchie Video Search

This is the main unique selling proposition of the platform and how the platform initially came to be.

If you have a ton of video content in your course, it feels like a lot of value to your students but may also get overwhelming…

Searchie allows user to search for specific content within your library and even takes them to the timestamp within the video where that term is mentioned

Example:

You offer a fitness course with a ton of videos.
Your student wants to learn more about “shoulder exercises
They enter that keyword in the search bar
They will find all of the videos you mention that keyword and exactly where in the video you do!

All of this is automatically done by Searchie when you upload a video.

What the platform essentially does is automatically transcribe your video and scrub that text when a user does a search.

Although your videos have to be uploaded to Searchie for this to work, you can embed that search in an external platform with Widgets.

Of course, there are a few additional filters the user can add on top of the keyword to refine the results.

On your end, you can create different folders to categorize your content and to allow them to only search within a specific folder from one search bar.

You can easily import videos directly from your computer, Dropbox, Facebook page, podcast feed, Google Drive,etc.

Last note on this feature, although you will lack the ability to create proper learning tools in Searchie (quizzes, assignments,etc.) you can also attach extra documents or links to your videos.

Searchie Hub: Building your member’s area

Beyond just having a video library, Searchie allows you to actually build a membership area to display your content nicely.

This isn’t exactly the kind of course builder you’ll get with something like Teachable or Kajabi, but it might be just enough!

These are called Searchie Hubs and have their own area.

Searchie 2.0 brought the possibility of customizing these to a greater extent.

You can create as many pages you want with a very basic front-end builder.

This is both for public pages and private ones that only paid members will be able to access.

Note: this probably isn’t a great substitute for a proper funnel builder but could be enough for some users.

You will add different sections and layout with standard elements like Text, buttons, images, etc.

Again, although this is probably not enough to build a high-converting sales page, it’s very handy to build your member’s area to your liking!

You can sell these Hubs directly from Searchie with a very basic checkout (and by connecting Stripe), setup a custom domain for it, and handle basic feature such as a welcome email and SEO details

Of course, you can change several branding elements such as font, color scheme and logo.

I’d say this is way above average compared to other popular course platforms when it comes to customizing your member’s area!.

Searchie Audience Analytics & Automations

The last core set of features to review here is how you’ll be able to track and analyze how your student’s consume your videos.

This kind of analytics is available for several other course platforms but searchie does make this a lot more granular.

You can see specific video analytics such as view, retention, searches, completion and rating.

But also any specific person’s statistic as well.

This will enable you to better understand how much of your content is consumed and how, and inform decisions to improve your user experience.

Finally, with Audience tags, you’ll be able to easily create subgroups of your audience and what they have access to.

This can simplify the number of products you have to create by simply adjusting what specific groups of people can and can’t see within your product.

And although this feature isn’t currently available, Searchie is planning to enable drip content as well as creating a member’s directory and badges, which should enable even further opportunity to optimize engagement.

What other tools your might need 

As we’ve seen so far, Searchie has a lot of unique features to offer.

But of course we need to compare that to what a typical online course creator will need in their journey.

The core other tools needed that Searchie doesn’t provide right now are:

• A proper funnel building capability
• An email marketing system

This doesn’t mean Searchie is falling short in any way, but simply that it probably is something that you’ll use alongside other tools!

Searchie offers a great back-end design and much improved user experience overall since it’s big 2.0 update.

Although it takes a little bit of time to understand the difference between folders, playlist and hubs, the learning curve is fairly simple.

Most of the processes of creation are intuitive and the setup you’ll have to undertake is a one-off kind of task.

On-going, Searchie can be easily managed by simply getting your new content up or automatically uploaded, and sorted, in the platform.

The fact that the platform is a specialized tool rather than an all-in-one, also reduces the number of features to learn.

Of course, in our attempt to review Searchie properly and categorize it among competitors, let’s do a deep dive into its cost.

You can get started with Searchie for as low as $29/mo.

This first plan will allow for enough to get your feet wet and create 1 Hub (aka membership/course).

Note that you will be able to access the Analytics we’ve reviewed from the Pro plan on.

The biggest hurdle you’ll hit with the Basic plan will probably be the upload limit.

This is a bit tricky to understand at first and uncommon but the way it works is that you can technically upload an unlimited amount of videos, but it is capped each month.

Upgrading to the Pro plan at $83/month (billed annually) is not cheap when all-in-one platforms like Kartra go for the same price (and provide a wider range of features).

But Searchie goes deep in a particular set of features rather than wide and definitely a great tool for those who are ready to upgrade their membership.

As mentioned before, this is a specialist tool you’ll probably use on top of other platforms.

Searchie has a growing community built off of its founder visibility.

There are several ways you can get support or meet other members.

A direct messaging chatbot is available during working hours through which you’ll be able to get speedy support.

You can also go through their Searchie Academy and get most of your basic questions answered as well as learn the fundamentals of the platform.

You’ll even get to have your word to say about new features with the handy Feature Request!

To network with other users, you can join the official private Facebook group with currently over 5,000 members!

And if you want to learn more about building a membership, Stu Mclaren will also be able to help 🙂