0:00:00 - (Alane): Welcome to Automate Your Agency. Every week we bring you expert insights, practical tips, and success stories that will help you streamline your business operations and boost your growth. Let's get started on your journey to more efficient and scalable operations.
0:00:18 - (Micah): All right, Alane, so what do you do if you want to give clients the ability to see what you have going on, but also give them the ability to communicate back with you? It's a client portal. Right. It's just that easy. Let's go ahead and get one set up.
0:00:36 - (Alane): It sounds so simple, but the options are really limited. And we've tried a number of different ways to manage this. We've tried creating a separate Trello board that each client has access to. We've tried doing a separate Slack channel that they only have access to. And it really it in every scenario because we use ClickUp, it created double work.
0:00:59 - (Micah): Yep. We even tried to use Jira for a period. We never saw the light of day. I don't even know if you saw any of that, Alane.
0:01:06 - (Alane): I didn't know that.
0:01:06 - (Micah): But yeah, we went down a whole path. Like, maybe we can use Jira and get that whole kind of a service portal put together. But it. All of them felt short and like you said, all of them required double work, so. So if, if you're using ClickUp, Asana or Monday right now, there are client portal solutions out there, but then you look at it, it's like starting at $120 a month and limited number of portals and.
0:01:39 - (Micah): But then you get this feature bloat like Asana, ClickUp or Monday, you already have your workflows in there. You're already collaborating internally. You probably have automation set up if you've listened to this podcast long enough, hopefully. And then, you know, then you look at a client portal option. And this is one of the reasons we never bought one that existed was because you look at the feature set and it's like, oh, well, project management.
0:02:05 - (Micah): Oh wait, invoicing. Oh wait, file management and uploads. Like, I don't need all of that.
0:02:14 - (Alane): I want everything to exist in my ClickUp.
0:02:17 - (Micah): Yeah, I'm already tracking all of that. It's already working. I just need to pull the stuff out of ClickUp. Right. In our case, or Monday or Asana, and then put it in a nice way so that clients could log in and see that.
0:02:33 - (Alane): And one of the scariest things would be, you want to have this layer. Like you're saying you want to have this layer because you're already using ClickUp, Asana Or Monday, want to have this layer because you're already managing projects in there to say, okay, client, I just want you to be able to see this so you can see the status, you can ask comments, you could add a new idea to the backlog. But how do you do that? And then, you know, one. One way that some disasters have happened are guest users.
0:03:02 - (Micah): Yeah, that's. I've heard some. We've never done it, but I have heard horror stories where you invite the client into your work management or project management tool, and then somebody accidentally leaves a comment that's supposed to be internal, but it's client, it ends up being accessible to the client. No good comes to that.
0:03:21 - (Alane): Yeah. I mean, it didn't create that layer.
0:03:23 - (Micah): Right.
0:03:23 - (Alane): You're inviting them into your ecosystem where you really want that layer of separation. And we've tried different tools too.
0:03:31 - (Micah): Yeah. And honestly, they just all fell short. So like we sat around and we were, I mean, we were just kind of like talking about, man, this client portal thing is still plaguing us, like we still can't solve it. And so what we ended up doing and have been doing is regardless whether it's Trello or Slack or email or Jira or anything else. Right. We have to spend so much time getting the data out of our work system or our project system and then reformat it and send it over to the client and then hopefully they read it. But then what happens if they have feedback? Well, now it's in an email thread. Or what happens if they have a new request? Well, now we've got multiple email threads going.
0:04:15 - (Micah): So now not only are we spending so much time getting data out and sending it, but then we're like juggling it all around. And then account managers have to get that back into the project management system so that the team actually knows what needs to be done, what are the revisions and all that kind of stuff. And it's just messy.
0:04:36 - (Alane): And we, I mean, we were struggling with this and this is a big pain point for clients too. We have a lot of clients that are agencies and then other B2B companies because you're using these systems. Right. So how do you work this out? So we'd get questions on client calls like, hey, do you know a good client portal app? And we're like, yeah, not really. And you know, Micah and I's background that we've talked about a lot is that we're software developers. We've. We've built a number of software, we exited a couple of platforms and then we have arvo now.
0:05:10 - (Alane): And Micah, being the Micah that he is, is listening to our needs as a company and having clients and using ClickUp and then our clients saying these same things and they're using ClickUp, Asana and Monday with the same pain point. And so really started to define what a solution looked like.
0:05:30 - (Micah): Yeah. And so, I mean, now I feel like I'm tooting my own horn with that, with that introduction.
0:05:37 - (Alane): Well, you should, Micah. You could be a cool guy sometimes.
0:05:40 - (Micah): All right. What do you mean sometimes? I'm going to leave it at that. All right, so what we, I mean, we sat down and we go, what do we really need in the client portal? What do we need in a client portal? You know what, what, how do we make this so we're not doing double work? How do we only have the features that make sense? How do we make it super easy to use? We sat down and we sketch this all out. And I remember just looking at it and this isn't that long ago, like the end of last year saying, I think we can build this and I think we can integrate directly into ClickUp, pull the data out of ClickUp and put it in a beautiful format with, with the integration, not with double work.
0:06:29 - (Micah): And then let's add like a request new or make a new request feature. And like, let's add upload assets feature and let's give them different views, like a list view or a board view or ordering it in different ways or grouping it in different ways. But it's always pulled directly from the project management tool, and that was the start of it. So we built it not only so that we could use it, but also so that anybody else who has clients and is using Asana, ClickUp or Monday can also use it. And we got it to the point, Alane, like you've, you've gone in there and done this.
0:07:10 - (Micah): It's literally three clicks. Like, create a new portal, connect to ClickUp, pick the lists that you want to display from. It's done. It does everything else. It pulls the tasks, the sections, the groups, the priorities, the statuses, the colors, the assignees, the assignee avatars. Like, then you pick and choose what you want it to show and not show. You invite your clients as users and they have their own password protected portal fully ready to go in seconds.
0:07:44 - (Alane): Yeah. And they, they can only see what, what you want them to see, which is great. And you know, Micah, I think we could dive into some of those features that you just described. But like one, one thing that just feels really simple, you Start working with a client and you're like, hey, send me over these assets. Then they send them over, then you upload them somewhere else, then you get them into the project management system so your team knows what to do with it. You know, you might have three things to do just with that one thing.
0:08:11 - (Alane): Well, now with the upload asset, that would go directly into that project in your project management system. And this does sit on top of Micah used the example of ClickUp, but this does integrate with ClickUp, Asana and Monday. So it doesn't matter which one that you'd be able to integrate with your account and then just have that one project or whatever, board view, whatever it's called in that particular system that you give them access to only what that client should see. Right. They're not going to see everything in your account.
0:08:45 - (Micah): Yeah, and that's the important part. So that that gap that you were talking about, Alane, or that extra layer is it's pulling up the information that you want, but then it adds that extra layer on top. So in ClickUp, for example, we can have all of our internal communication that that hits a wall. It never bubbles up. You can never see that in the client portal. But on the client portal there is a comments feature that you and the client can have a conversation about specific tasks.
0:09:16 - (Micah): And so that will go down into ClickUp through the integration, but again, it never comes up. And descriptions, subtasks, those are all settings that you can stop from going into the client portal. And you have that gap or that wall. But when a new request comes in, that can go down into ClickUp so you're operating. And we do the same way we're operating in our normal workflow without any changes. But we eliminated all that work and then we added a feature that takes AI and says look at all the tasks auto, generate a status update.
0:09:54 - (Micah): Super cool. And then in one button you can send that status update.
0:09:58 - (Alane): Yeah, that one is one of my favorites. And then the board having the board view, so you can have it as a list view or you can have it as a board view and the board view. And I'm not a real big Kanban person, to be honest, unless I need to look at stuff by status. And then I like to look at it in Kanban. And so. Okay, well, Alane, when is that important? Well, like one thing comes to mind is if you are an HR company and you help onboard employees for your clients.
0:10:30 - (Alane): Well, what employees are in the offer letter status, what employees are in onboarding, which ones are in the benefit. So you can see, you know, I, I like that view for something like that. And. But you could toggle back and forth. You can go back to the list view or board view.
0:10:49 - (Micah): Yep. And so we are adding features left and right. We're getting initial users in there. The feedback we're getting is phenomenal. We're very excited about that. But we are also really open to feedback right now. Like, we have our use cases, we're really dialed in on how we want to use it and what we're building it for. But we want this to work for other people as well. So I think if you're interested, it's Client Portals IO, a nice, generic, easy to remember domain name, Client Portals IO. I don't know if that rolls off the tongue or not, but it's pretty easy to say.
0:11:30 - (Alane): Yeah, it is plural. It has the S. So, you know, I think that might be the only thing that, that might get mixed up. But yeah, you can try it. There's a free trial on there. You can try it out, add a portal, play around with it. And you know, like Micah said, we drink our own Kool Aid here. So, you know, we, we're building it from the needs that we see and then super open to others that are using it and trying it and had similar pain points.
0:11:57 - (Micah): Absolutely.
0:11:57 - (Alane): All right, so clientportals IO, go check it out, hook up a portal, see what you think, let us know. And we're super excited to hear from you and have it out into the world.
0:12:10 - (Alane): Thanks for listening to this episode of Automate Your Agency. We hope you're inspired to take your business to the next level. We have free content and tools for automating your business at our website workdayninja.com.
0:12:22 - (Micah): And join us next week as we dive into more ways to automate and scale your business.
0:12:26 - (Alane): Bye for now.
