TL;DR version: The Rainmaker Platform is shifting from a pure technology play to software with services included before the end of June, at much higher pricing. That means if you want Rainmaker at its current pricing, you should start your free trial now.
Updated 6/16/17: The Rainmaker Platform is now off the market as a standalone service. Click here to learn about our new complete solutions for digital marketing that works.
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When we rebranded from Copyblogger Media to Rainmaker Digital in September of 2015, it was a firm statement that put the Rainmaker Platform at the forefront. But it was also a foreshadowing of where we saw things going.
We knew we were headed from software-as-a-service (SaaS), to software and service to create complete solutions. People need sophisticated marketing technology, yes — but they also need done-for-them services such as design, content, and lead generation strategy.
The technology is only getting more sophisticated, and we plan to remain at the forefront of that with Rainmaker. But sophisticated technology calls for equally sophisticated strategy and execution — and not everyone has that kind of expertise in-house.
Our original goal was to create marketing technology for entrepreneurs and small businesses that are doing content marketing themselves or via freelancers. In the meantime, we’ve been turning away businesses happily willing to pay for a more complete solution.
Our go-forward strategy is to follow what the market is telling us. We’re going to offer you the services that we’ve been teaching and doing for ourselves over the last decade.
A complete Rainmaker solution provider
We’ve been doing service work for our Rainmaker Platform customers for over a year, but it’s been very cautious. There are many ways to develop a client services department, but given that we’ve been product-focused for so long, we weren’t arrogant enough to think we could just pull it off effortlessly.
In that last year, we’ve explored several viable ways to do more for our customers and prospects as a hybrid technology and digital marketing service provider. After careful deliberation, we’ve come up with a path that allows us to expertly provide anything that a Rainmaker user needs.
Rainmaker Digital has entered into a letter of intent to partner with an existing digital agency, Nimble Worldwide. We’ve had a long relationship with Nimble, as they were our email marketing provider for years before we developed our own solution, RainMail.
Effectively, the Rainmaker assets of the company (excluding StudioPress, Synthesis, Copyblogger, Authority, and DCI, which are not affected by this move at all) will be combined with Nimble assets into a new entity, with us as the majority owner.
First of all, that means you can rest assured that the company you know today remains the company you’ll be doing business with going forward. Plus, the Rainmaker side of things will be where I’ll be putting much of my personal attention and effort.
That said, this deal provides instant access to an experienced team of digital marketing professionals and a network of talented contractors that ensures our service solutions are expertly crafted and delivered. This grows the Rainmaker team significantly, without the pain and uncertainty of building an agency from scratch.
The change in business model unfortunately left four of our existing employees without positions, along with the loss of some of our own contractors. That was certainly no fun, and our operations leadership preserved every job possible despite the significant reorganization.
On the brighter side, this will open up a lot of work for our Certified Writers and members of the Genesis design community as we get rolling. We’re very excited to provide additional freelance and employment opportunities to the large ecosystem we’ve cultivated over the years.
To sum up, I’m 100 percent certain that this is the smarter move compared with trying to build an internal agency from scratch. And ultimately, the clear winners in the deal are our customers and prospects.
What can we help you with?
The first meaningful impact of this will be that we’ll be able to do just about anything you need related to your digital marketing efforts. That includes:
- Design
- Development
- Strategy
- Content creation
- SEO and social
- Adaptive funnel sequences
- Digital advertising and media planning
- Turn-key digital marketing packages
On that last point, we’ll be able to provide clearly defined service bundles that allow you to quit thinking about marketing and focus on the rest of your business. If the ROI is there, why would you say no?
We informed the thousands of existing Rainmaker customers about these new services last week, and the response has been enthusiastic. That means if you decide to get on board with the Platform before the switch, you’ll have the benefit (but not the obligation) of access to these services as well.
We’ll be rolling out access to both project-based and retainer-based solutions in the coming months. Once things are live, we’ll let you know here.
The end of “off the shelf” Rainmaker
All of this restructuring is aimed at offering you more options from a trusted source. Of course, with any major escalation in value, there are changes to the way things have been.
The biggest change is that going forward, we will no longer sell the Rainmaker Platform “a la carte.” In other words, the sales process will become more hands on, and less like a “pull out your credit card and sign up online” SaaS.
All future sales of the Platform will be bundled with services, and at a significantly higher price. We’re anticipating that this change will happen before the end of June, 2017.
So, if you’ve been contemplating the Platform, but don’t feel like you need additional service components, you should start your free trial before the switch happens. We’ll naturally send out reminders before the point of no return.
Exciting stuff to come … stay tuned! Feel free to ask questions in the comments, and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.
Reader Comments (27)
Trust is the word to describe Rainmaker for me. Knowledge would work as well. I’m on the Rainmaker Platform since the beta version and I couldn’t be happier with all the benefits for this price. I believe this is the smartest move and very excited for the new services from you guys! Thanks Brian, Sonia, and all this amazing team.
Thanks Daniel!
You mean “Software-and-a-service (SaaS)” 🙂
Oh lordy, yes 🙂
Jokes aside … this is the bit that interests me the most about this move.
Technology can move too quickly at times, with so many options from which to choose … and it can be hard for vendors to keep pace with potentially-transient fads.
Hopefully, this move can provide great enhancements to the Rainmaker platform … while maintaining stability, and keeping the product as up-to-date as possible.
Erik, I think you’re right about the faddish aspect of emerging tech. One benefit we’ll get with this move is working in the front lines with real clients to see how they view things like AI and machine learning. So far we’re hearing that we’re much more advanced compared to the average business out there.
I guess my concern is that with a focus shift (or, at least, a broadening) to semi-bespoke services, the core platform itself will stagnate.
What I’m wondering is whether things that would previously have been in the feature pipeline for the platform will now get wrapped up into the services side and become pay-to-play?
For those of us that don’t take up any service offerings, is the platform we have now basically the platform we should expect to have forever (excluding bug fixes, security etc)?
Chris, that’s not what’s going to happen. As I said in the email I sent you last week, anytime we do any bespoke code, we can add it to the Platform if it makes sense from a general standpoint. This is fairly common when a technology solution goes upstream.
That’s a good assurance to have, thanks Brian.
Will pricing and/or integration of Rainmail change for existing RM users?
No change for existing users.
Lots of words in your promo, but no numbers. No prices, no deal. And exactly for what?
This is just a heads up, Daniel. We’ll have more information as we closer to the June cut-off.
Thank you, Brian, for keeping us up-to-date.
Does this mean you’ll be making more themes available for the platform? Not much added recently in that area. . .
Susanna
Yes, we’ve been talking a lot about all new Genesis themes for both Rainmaker and SPS. Lots of cool design work we’ll be getting from the Genesis community.
Rainmaker = TRUST.
That about sums it up.
I really want to be excited about the change, just so many questions. I console myself with my belief the attention paid users of the platform can only improve with the new entity. Especially when compared with the last year or so where, I can only assume, you were shifting gears strategically.
1. The new entity will couple Nimble Worldwide’s assets with the Rainmaker assets (so you sold Jerod? 😀 ). I’m curious what the Nimble assets are. For instance, I’m guessing the content marketing acumen stored as RD institutional knowledge, the platform, and the podcasting arm ala rainmaker.fm are the RD part. I’m guessing the Nimble part is their services delivery and “sales” team?
2. I’m thankful you guys are at least discussing a version of the Genesis child themes that styles the Rainmaker components, are you considering including custom email design for use with RainMail for the new version?
3. Does the new entity plan to communicate differently with customers? IE, if you are building components for enterprise-type clients, will that schedule be regularly communicated and the roadmap updated to all users?
4. Will resellers have the opportunity to fund or code components to be added to the platform? Or is that only for upstream clients?
5. How aggressive will the new entity be in iterating the platform? I haven’t felt a sense of urgency to update it since you guys strode into the RainMail rollout.
6. Brian, what is your long-term vision for the new entity? IE, when the platform launched the rhetoric was euphoric. Making the world a better place for Rainmakers. I’ve found it decidedly less ecstatic ever since the initial launch.
Thanks in advance for any answers given!
Lots of good questions, Jason. At the moment we’re negotiating the operating agreement and planning the service and product bundles.
Nimble is an existing agency, so their assets are people and service-oriented sales and operations. As we get past the transition period, we’ll be telling you a lot more. But for the next few months, we’ll continue concentrate on platform development and the training we’ve been doing for DIY users.
Also, the email sent to Rainmaker customers the week before this announcement went into more detail on several of your questions. Maybe take another look at that?
I think the one thing that is unclear is whether “access but not obligation” to the services means that current customers are getting some grade of services for free or if that means we get access to purchase them on top of our monthly fee? It sounds like there will be different packages, so are current customers getting the lowest bundled service package with our monthly fee, or something in those regards?
I know the packages aren’t released yet, but I’m just curious as to whether I will have to pay extra for all of the listed service offerings or not. Would go a long way into knowing whether we should fast track our 2nd site on the platform or not.
The services cost money of course. Once the model changes, some services will be included with the Platform no matter what, at a higher price.
Right, obviously the services will cost money. I’m wondering about the ones that are included. So will current platform users:
A) Have those included services to use that are included with the lowest package.
or
B) have the option of keeping everything as it is right now (our fee for use of the platform) or upgrade to the more expensive version where some services are included?
It sounds like option B is what is happening, but it’s not 100% clear.
Yes, it’s B. But you can also request one-off project work like design, content, and SEO, plus development for custom tweaks to your particular Rainmaker sites. So it’s a broader menu than just a bundled recurring package, although that will be a big focus going forward.
Okay – thanks for the clarification.
Brian, are you censoring the comments now?
I posted before Jeff above, but it looks like you deleted my comment.
You take thousands of dollars of my money over the years, and now delete my comment because I’m not another fanboy.
I think people should see a real dialogue and I would greatly appreciate it if you would respond to the questions/concerns I posted.
Twitter and reddit are other great venues if you want to censor your paying customers. Luckily I’ve got screenshots and saved the page as html file with comment “awaiting moderation” …
Hey Jackson, not sure when you commented, but I didn’t moderate comments over the long weekend (or even look at them until this morning). I’ll see if I can find it. Sorry about that.
You’re welcome to repost the comment. And since you’re an existing customer, why don’t you tell us who you are, with a link to your site, and use a real email address? Looks pretty shady right now, which may be why someone deleted or spammed your comment the first time.
After reading WPtavern article, I would appreciate some clarification.
Within the next 3 weeks, I must choose if I should subscribe to Studiopress Sites and cancel my existing RM Platform subscription.
The article suggests big changes are coming with a new outsource team offering bundled packages. But I didn’t read about any big changes with the RM Platform.
It is clear you value Studiopress more than RM Platform. Will you develop and improve Studiopress more often and quicker than RM Platform?
I understand you are not increasing the monthly subscription price for existing RM Platform subscribers because the big change refers to your new outsource team and bundled packages and not any big changes with the RM Platform.
If there are going to be big changes with RM, are you going to have any big changes with the RM Platform in the next 30 days? Or will you minimize or stop development like you did with the Premise product?
For example, you know many people are hoping for a huge improvement with the support desk and response time. Will you be improving in the next 30 days?
Stephanie, it’s not that we value SPS more than RP. They are for completely different market segments. RP is for more sophisticated marketers, and the experience of using Rainmaker is completely different from SPS.
As for improving the Platform, we will continue to issue a new update every month, just as we have for the last three years. I also included other details about future improvements to the Platform stemming from custom work in the email I sent you two weeks ago. And I’ll be sending out another email to current customers next week … hope this helps!
Brian, thanks for the clarification.
Your info will help me make a better decision in the next few weeks.
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