Mighty Networks is the software I use to power my courses and community for music marketing. At this point i’ve been using it for years, so I feel I can comfortably review Mighty Networks and talk about the pro’s and con’s. I hope this helps you decide if it’s the right fit for you and your business.
Click here to check out Mighty Networks.
What Is Mighty Networks?
At its heart Mighty Network is a community building software. Think of it like a Facebook group, a Discord server, or like your own private social media network. Your top level platform on Mighty Networks is known as your network.
Inside of your community you can have spaces. These spaces can be sub-communities inside your overall network, or they can be courses, cohort courses and more. You have a lot of control over how you structure your network and spaces, making as few or as many as you need.
You can charge for access to your network or make it free. But you can also charge for access to individual spaces inside your network. Pricing can be a one-off cost or a subscription model, and you can bundle spaces together or sell them individually.
Why I Use Mighty Networks
Prior to using Mighty Networks I was hosting my courses on Teachable and using a Facebook group for my community. But I hated the idea that I didn’t actually own my community, and at any time Facebook could throttle how effectively I could reach my community. When I found Mighty Networks it was a perfect solution for that problem, especially since I could also host my courses inside of it.
This meant that my students would have access to the community in the same place as their courses. The entire experience was a lot better, and Mighty Networks even has a mobile app so people can connect on-the-go. On top of that, it was actually cheaper than Teachable for me.
I sell my courses through funnels on ThriveCart then use a Zapier integration to automatically send invites for whatever course they purchased. After selling thousands of courses I can say this tech stack is quite reliable, i’ve only had it fail a handful of times (more on that later).
Who Should Use It
If you’re like me, a content creator that also sells courses, Mighty Networks is an obvious fit. However I think there are several other types of people it could be useful for:
- Content Creators – even if you don’t sell courses having a community is a great idea for your brand
- Patreon Users – instead of using Patreon and giving them 12% of your revenue, you can build an even better experience on Mighty Networks
- Brands – if you own a company with a strong brand that unites people with a singular vision, having a community can be a great way to deepen that relationship
- Musicians – you could use it for just the community aspect alone (which they offer on their cheapest plan btw)
- Podcasters – this can either replace Patreon, or offer you a way to get people talking about your podcast. Maybe include a second podcast thats only for members?
- Causes – involved with a charity or non-profit? A community might be a great way to bring everyone together to discuss the topic
Things I Love
I’m a huge fan of almost everything about Mighty Networks. However the most impressive thing is the feel of the community. For example:
- Every person can customize their profile, have a bio, an image and links
- You can come up with labels for people to categorize themselves
- People can DM each other (but you can also turn this feature off if you wish)
- You can create polls and articles as posts
- Posting and replying feels just as fluid as social media
- You can livestream natively inside your community
It doesn’t feel like an afterthought, it feels premium.
Next, i’m a fan of how their course system works. When you make a space you can convert it to a course by giving it a ‘table of contents’ with modules and lessons (you can customize what these things are called btw). Each course can have its own sub-community for students to interact, or you can disable that feature. Lessons in your course can be video based or text based, or you can mix and match. You can even add quizzes and downloadable material.
I also love their mobile app. Unless you’re on the Pro plan to have a custom app (for $30,000 per year), you’ll be using their Mighty Networks app. While the app isn’t custom branded for your network, it functions beautifully.
Community members can post in the community just like on social media. They can even consume their courses straight from the app. As the owner of the network you can do practically anything on the app you’d do on the computer.
Things I Don’t Love
Mighty Networks is awesome, but it isn’t perfect.
Sales Pages
One particular thing I don’t like is their sales pages for individual spaces. Not only are you very limited in how you format the sales pages for your courses / spaces, you don’t have the ability to do bump offers or one click upsells.
This is why I sell my courses using ThriveCart. I need to be able to clearly convey the value of my courses on the sales page, and I use upsells to increase my average cart value by offering other courses my students might like.
One complication that arises from me selling on ThriveCart and sending invites to the Mighty Networks courses using the Zapier integration is that 0.1% of the time it fails. If someone had previously disabled all notifications for another network that uses Mighty Networks, the invitation won’t send. Then the customer emails me, and I have to ask them for another email address for me to manually invite.
Out of over 3,000 course sales I think this problem has only happened 5 times. So don’t stress too much about it.
Video Player
The video player inside of Mighty Networks is pretty good, but it isn’t as feature packed as some people might want. For example, if someone is on a bad connection they might get a lower res video file. If they wait for the video to process they’ll get the higher quality one, but there isn’t a way for people to manually choose a video quality to know about that.
You can adjust video speed but its tricky, you have to right click the video and show more controls to find that option. Additionally there are no captions available.
Obviously these gripes weren’t deal breakers for me, otherwise I wouldn’t still be using Mighty Networks.
Mighty Networks Conclusion
Overall i’m clearly a fan of Mighty Networks. Over the years i’ve seen other solutions pop up that could solve many of the problems Mighty Networks solved for me. However every time I look into them they lack some key feature that prevents me from switching. Additionally, migrating over 3,000 community members would be incredibly difficult, and i’d likely lose many of them along the way.
The closest thing i’ve seen to being a viable solution is Skool. However I don’t have enough experience with it to say for sure.
