That’s the first big question we asked ourselves.
Practically, as a lifetime user, as long as Groove is still operating, we can always hope for better things to come. Being alive means having the chance to get better, and it applies to a company too.
At first, we felt something was very wrong seeing that all the top affiliates of Groove have jumped ship to ClickFunnels. It didn’t really bother us as what we are building on the platforms is still working, just that we felt that GrooveBlog seems to be slowing down.
On top of that Rich Schefren’s Steal Our Winners has also moved back to his own website Strategic Profits and Steal Our Winners Groove Edition was gone.
Mike Filsaime Comes Clean
Mike Filsaime finally revealed in Dec 2022 that they were facing financial liquidity issues as their money got locked up in Stripe – Every merchant’s nightmare when the Payment Gateway decides to keep your money for 6 months. Another Problem with Scaling too big too fast…
With the high development and operating costs, they soon ran into cash flow problems.
But the worst problem we think was Mike has not been paying affiliates their commissions. Trust has been broken. In some of their eyes, Mike was cheating them with their money, especially if they ran ads and spent money building their affiliate offers. Well, they thought it was just a passing phase, a phase that lasted too long than expected.
We wonder if they have ever stopped the affiliate tracking too as the stats have not been consistent from place to place. No point in creating more angry affiliates asking for commissions. Right? 🤷🏻♂️
Full details at https://groovedigital.com/groovion. But in case they replaced the page with new Groovion (Groove Periodic Updates of the state of their Company) content, Below are the YouTube videos that are embedded on that page. And they include short summaries in pdf too – Links at the bottom of this page.
Current State of GrooveCM
So it seems that they have laid off a significant portion of their development staff, focusing only on what is working right now, namely:
- GroovePages
- GrooveSell
- GrooveMember
- GrooveMail
- GrooveBlog
- GrooveVideo
- GrooveWebinar
- GrooveKart
So if you want to create a sales funnel with a drag-and-drop WYSIWYG page editor, set up membership sites, blogs, automated webinars, e-commerce stores, and to link those with email marketing campaigns. Groove is still unbeatable with its one-time pricing.
Future of GrooveCM
The rest of the software will likely only be resumed in 2024 and beyond and most likely it will be another round of buggy period for the new apps where we need to be adaptive looking for workarounds to the problems. According to the GrooveCM Sales Page, the followings are the affected ones:
- GrooveSurveys
- GrooveCalendar
- GrooveFunnelsMapping
- GroovePipe
- GrooveStream
- GrooveConference
- GrooveDesk
Software Developments are covered in the Groovion Part 2 video here:
So What’s Next for Us?
GroovePipe, the supposed alternative for PipeDrive in which we can manage leads and track communications is one of the developments we have been looking forward to as we are setting up our own marketing agency. Being a service-based business, this would be an essential part, thus we have looked for alternatives and found Peng Joon’s SalesProcess.
For a product-based business, we feel that Groove CM is still up to the tasks. But we’ll never know what happens under the hood in the engine… it is a “more than capable” Sales Funnel, from email opt-in to digital product delivery and membership sites, Groove does it all.
I haven’t got to test out GrooveKart, the Shopify alternative yet. Still acquiring NFT IPs and launching when the Bull Market comes.
In fact, we will use both platforms for our marketing agency with similar domain names and we’ll be testing some integrations of both in another project.
Some members have complained that Groove has been excessively sending affiliate offers from other partners. On a positive note, they are doing everything they can to keep their heads above the water and to ensure Groove will still keep going for a long long time.
The biggest advantage of Groove in the Sales Funnel market is the lifetime plan, but it is also its major disadvantage as a company will always require new revenue to come in to cover operating costs like staff payroll, product development, server maintenance, etc.
Conclusion
Even if Groove is not paying any affiliate commission, it can still be used to build our own websites and blogs to market and sell our own or others’ products and services.
