"Easy to Use System." So Why Does It Need the Free Course?

I saw something today that I want to talk about, not to criticise the person selling it, but because it crystallised something I have been thinking about for a while.

It was a social media content planner - a genuinely nice looking one, built on a popular platform, on sale today for a special price. The kind of thing that promises to organise your content calendar, your captions, your hashtags, all in one place. The sales page used the phrase "easy to use" near the top, which is the same phrase almost every product in this category uses.

A little further down the page, there was a course included. To help you learn how to use it.

That detail is the whole story, and I think it is worth pulling apart properly.

WHAT YOU ARE ACTUALLY BUYING

When a product is built on a platform like Airtable, Notion, Monday or Canva, what you are buying is not necessarily a finished system. You may be buying someone else's template, built inside a tool that you now also have to learn.

This is not a small distinction. It changes what the purchase actually costs you, in three separate stages that nobody mentions on the sales page.

Stage one: learning the platform itself.

Before you can do anything with the template, you need to understand how the underlying tool works. Where things are. How views and filters and fields behave. This has nothing to do with your business - it is general platform literacy, and it takes real time regardless of how intuitive the platform claims to be.

Stage two: customising the template to fit your actual business.

A template is, by definition, designed to work for more than one business. The fields may be roughly right. The categories may be roughly relevant. But making it fit your particular way of working can still involve quite a lot of thought and work.

And some of those decisions are difficult to make when you are not the person who designed the original structure and don't necessarily know why it was set up that way.

Stage three: maintaining it.

Templates do not maintain themselves. If something needs to update automatically, you may be the person who has to build that automation, inside a platform you have only just learned, for a use case you have only just customised.

The course exists because stages one and two can genuinely take some learning for someone without prior experience.

That is not a criticism of the course. In fact, including one is probably the responsible thing to do.

But it does tell you something important about what you are buying.

"Easy to use" and "easy to make useful for your business" are not necessarily the same thing.

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN BUYING A TEMPLATE AND BUYING A WORKING SYSTEM

I think the word "system" gets used rather loosely.

A template gives you a structure. It may be a very good structure, but there is usually still work to do before it reflects the way your own business operates.

A working system has already had much more of that thinking done. It may still need configuring for your business - sometimes quite a lot - but you are not simply being handed an attractive framework and expected to turn it into the solution yourself.

That's an important distinction, because the amount you pay at checkout tells you very little about the real cost of getting from purchase to useful.

The template itself might cost £20, £50 or £100.

But how many hours will you spend learning it?

How much time will you spend adapting it?

Will you need another piece of software to make two parts talk to each other?

Will you need to pay someone to do that for you?

And what happens when you want it to do something six months from now that you hadn't thought of when you first set it up?

BEFORE YOU BUY THE "EASY" OPTION

None of this means that Airtable, Notion, Monday or any of the other platforms are bad tools. They can be extraordinarily useful.

But I think it is worth being realistic about what you are buying.

If you're buying a template, don't just ask whether the template looks good in the demonstration. Ask what has to happen between buying it and having something that genuinely works for your business.

Do you need to learn the platform?

Will you need to decide which fields, stages and categories make sense for the way you work?

What happens when your business doesn't quite fit the example?

Will you need to build automations?

And when something stops working six months from now, will you know how to fix it?

None of those things necessarily makes it a bad purchase.

You may enjoy setting systems up. You may already know the platform. You may have a fairly standard process that fits the template beautifully.

But if what you're actually looking for is less admin and less to think about, buying something that creates a new project before it saves you any time may not be the bargain it first appears to be.

The same applies at the other end of the market.

A more sophisticated CRM or business-management platform can do remarkable things, but don't assume that paying more removes the work.

The more flexible a system is, the more decisions there are usually to make about how it should work for your business. You may need to spend money having it configured for you, or spend your own time learning enough to configure it properly.

SOMEONE HAS TO DO THE THINKING

I've been thinking about this a great deal because I've been developing a deliberately simple system for my own kind of work: bespoke commissions where every job and every client is different.

One of the things that process has reinforced for me is that simplicity for the person using a system usually requires quite a lot of thinking somewhere else.

Someone has to decide what matters.

What doesn't.

What needs to be recorded.

What should happen automatically.

What is useful to see at a glance and what is just more information to maintain.

I've spent a lot of time working through those questions, because I don't think the answer is to give a busy maker another complicated piece of software to manage.

At the moment I'm still developing and testing my own approach, so I'm not going to turn this into a sales pitch for it. I'll share more about it when I'm ready.

But whether you're spending £20 on a template or considerably more on a CRM, I think the question is the same:

How much work is there between buying this and having it genuinely make my working day easier?

"Easy to use" doesn't answer that question.

Rosie