You’d actually be surprised by how much tech can support your business for just $9 a month when you’re trying to get started—or get started again—on a budget. I had a conversation with a client this week who is looking for ways to streamline and eventually automate more of her business.
The challenge... She’s working with a very tight budget.
This particular client previously had a GetOiling Basic account but eventually canceled her account completely due to financial restraints and she wasn't really utilizing it to it's full capacity so she seized the expense.
Now she’s ready to start rebuilding some of the infrastructure behind her business as a massage therapist, raindrop specialist and wellness educator.
“If $9 a month is her tech budget right now, what can we actually build with it?”
Once we started looking at everything available to her through GetOiling’s Seed plan, the answer was: Quite a bit.
Who Can Actually Use the GetOiling Seed Plan?
Before we start talking about everything we can do with $9, there’s an important distinction. The Seed and Starter plans are available specifically through GetOiling, which is only available to people who have a Young Living customer/member number. However, you do NOT have to be actively building a Young Living business or be a Brand Partner to use the platform.
You simply need to have a Young Living customer/member number during the account set up process. That matters because GetOiling’s sister platform, AttractWell, does not offer these lower-cost Seed and Starter options. AttractWell’s plans begin at the Basic level for $69/month (and worth every penny)!
I’m not saying every entrepreneur can suddenly run the tech side of their business for $9 a month.
But if you happen to be a Young Living customer AND you’re building another business—whether that business has anything to do with essential oils or not—you may have access to an extremely affordable starting point you haven’t considered, especially if you don't have a lot of upfront money to invest into your business just yet.
When every monthly expense matters, that information is worth knowing (you're welcome).
So, What Do You Actually Get for $9 a Month?
Before we talk about how I would strategically use everything, let’s look at what we actually have to work with.
With GetOiling’s Seed plan, you have access to things like:
- 1 custom landing page
- Up to 100 contacts
- 100 marketing credits each month
- Lead capture capabilities
- File hosting for downloadable resources
- A blog
- Contact management tools, including tags, to-dos and follow-up plans
- A booking link
- Booking-related email reminders and follow-up
- Zoom access for up to 2 attendees without a 40-minute meeting cutoff
- A way for visitors to contact you
- Connections to your social media
- A Leg Builder link, if that applies to your business
- Access to the GetOiling app for your own use
Are there limitations?
Absolutely.
We aren’t building a huge website.
We aren’t managing thousands of contacts.
We aren’t creating elaborate funnels or marketing automations.
And we can’t accept payments directly through GetOiling at this level.
But that’s not really the question we’re asking.
The question is:
Can we strategically use what IS included to support the business she has right now?
I think we can.
That One Landing Page Can Become Her Online Home
At first glance, having only one custom landing page sounds pretty limiting.
But this is where strategy comes in.
Instead of looking at it as:
“I only get one page.”
I’m looking at it as:
“How much work can we get this ONE page to do?”
For this particular client, we can strategically design that landing page to function as her simple homepage.
It can introduce who she is.
It can explain what she does and who she helps.
It can highlight a valuable free resource.
It can connect people to her social media.
It can give them a way to contact her.
And it can direct them toward the next step if they’re interested in working with her.
Does she eventually need a larger website?
YES... without question.
But she doesn’t have to operate with nothing. Right now, she needs an online home.
And we can create one... on a budget.
She Can Start Building Her First 100 Contacts
The Seed plan allows her to manage up to 100 contacts.
If she already had an email list of 5,000 people, obviously this wouldn’t be the right plan.
But she doesn’t.
She’s building.
So instead of paying for technology designed to manage thousands of contacts she doesn’t have yet, we’re going to focus on intentionally building the first 100. And I actually love looking at it that way. Let’s get to 100. Then we have a reason to upgrade.
We Can Create a Lead Magnet and Start Growing Her Email List
This is another important piece of the puzzle... we can create a valuable free resource that gives someone a reason to join her email list.
We can create a digital product in Canva (there is a free version if the monthly subscription is not in your budget). There are tons of templates to choose from if doing this yourself. You do not have to start designing from scratch. The templates are essentially plug and play. Add personalized copy, upload custom images or choose from stock photos and choose brand colors and fonts.
Once the digital product is created, download as a pdf and upload that file to GetOiling and now it can be used by the platform to capture leads.
Now someone can discover her through social media, a class she teaches, a networking conversation, a speaking opportunity, a referral or somewhere else entirely—and we have somewhere intentional to send them.
Instead of simply saying: “Follow me on Facebook...”
We can say: “I created something that might help you. You can grab it here.”
They get something valuable. She gains a new contact.
And we're beginning to build an audience she owns instead of relying entirely on social media to maintain those relationships. That’s a pretty significant piece of business infrastructure for a $9/month tech budget.
She Has a Simple CRM to Help Her Stay Organized
This is one of those features that may not sound exciting, but it can make a huge difference when you’re trying to streamline a business.
She has somewhere to manage the people she’s connecting with.
She can use tags to categorize the contacts.
She can create to-dos.
She can manage follow-up plans.
Is it an elaborate automated CRM at this level? No.
But sometimes streamlining your business doesn’t mean automating everything.
Sometimes it simply means:
I know where the information lives.
I know who I need to follow up with.
I know what needs to happen next.
That alone can remove a lot of unnecessary mental clutter.
People Can Book a Conversation With Her—And the Follow-Up Is Built In
This is one of those features that makes the $9 plan work harder than you might expect.
Instead of all the back-and-forth:
“What time works for you?”
“How about Tuesday?”
“I can’t do Tuesday. What about Thursday?”
She can simply send someone her booking link.
She determines the availability she wants to offer, and the person booking the appointment chooses the time that works best for them.
But it doesn't stop at simply choosing a time.
Once the appointment is booked:
- The appointment is automatically added to the calendar she has connected to her booking system
- The person booking can add the appointment to their own calendar
- The system can send email reminders leading up to the appointment
- It can also send a follow-up email after the appointment
So we’ve eliminated several manual steps.
She doesn’t have to coordinate schedules.
She doesn’t have to manually add the appointment to her calendar.
She doesn’t have to remember to send an appointment reminder.
And she can have a follow-up communication go out afterward. Even better?
Those booking-related emails do not use her monthly email marketing credits.
They’re part of the booking experience, which means we aren’t eating into the limited marketing credits we want to use elsewhere.So while Seed doesn’t include GetOiling’s broader marketing automation tools, that doesn’t mean every part of the customer experience has to be manual.
Someone can discover her.
Learn about her.
Book a conversation.
Get it onto their calendar.
Receive reminders.
Meet with her.
And receive a follow-up afterward.
All without her manually managing every step.
That is exactly the kind of simple automation I'm looking for when we're trying to make a small tech budget work harder.
Zoom Can Do A LOT More Than Host a Client Call
Now, you might be thinking: “Can’t I just get Zoom for free?”
Yes, you can.
Anyone can create a free Zoom account. But a standard free Zoom account limits most meetings with multiple participants to 40 minutes. The Zoom access included through GetOiling’s Seed plan works differently.
With Seed, you’re limited to up to 2 Zoom attendees, so this isn't the plan you'd use to host a large virtual class, workshop or webinar.
But there is a pretty significant benefit: There is no 40-minute cutoff. That makes it incredibly useful for a business that primarily needs Zoom for one-on-one conversations.
If she wants to schedule a 60-minute consultation, educational conversation or potential client call, she doesn’t have to worry about Zoom ending the meeting before they’re finished. But I’m also not looking at Zoom as just a meeting tool. I’m looking at it as a content creation tool.
She can use her Zoom access to:
- Record herself teaching directly to the camera
- Share her screen while teaching from a slide deck or presentation
- Pre-record an educational class or training
- Create tutorials
- Answer frequently asked questions
- Record longer-form educational videos
- Download those recordings to her computer when she’s finished
And because she isn’t working against that standard 40-minute cutoff, she has room to actually teach.
She could record a 45-minute educational class.
She could create an hour-long presentation.
She could record a series of shorter educational videos.
She could share her screen and walk someone through a resource she’s created.
Once she’s finished, she can download the recording and decide where it needs to live.
Maybe she uploads it publicly to YouTube so the content has another opportunity to be discovered.
Or maybe she uploads it as an unlisted YouTube video and shares that link only with the people she wants to have access to it. Seed does limit how much video can be hosted directly within GetOiling.
Instead of immediately paying for another video-hosting platform, we ask: “What do we already have access to that solves this problem?”
GetOiling gives us a way to create the content.
YouTube gives us a free option for housing it... plus another way to monetize our content.
And suddenly we're accomplishing quite a bit without adding another monthly subscription. This is what I mean when I talk about using what you already have.
She Can Build a Library of Valuable Blog Content
She also has access to a blog.
And this becomes especially valuable when we're working with only one custom landing page.
She may not have ten website pages, but she can still create individual pieces of content around the topics she's knowledgeable about.
Think about all of the questions you answer over and over again in your business.
Those can become blogs.
Things you regularly teach?
Blogs.
Resources you constantly recommend?
Blogs.
Something you posted about on social media that generated a great conversation?
Expand it into a blog.
Now, when that topic comes up again, you have somewhere to send people. And unlike a social media post that disappears down the feed, that content has a permanent home you can continue sharing. Little by little, we're building an online presence without needing a huge website to get started.
But What CAN'T We Do With the Seed Plan?
This is just as important as everything I've shared about what we can do. Know that there are limitations. And one of the biggest is: You cannot accept payments through GetOiling on the Seed plan.
So what happens when you're ready to sell something? If you're staying on Seed, you'll need another way to collect payment. That might mean using something like PayPal or Venmo and then manually managing what happens after someone pays.
Could that work temporarily? Absolutely.
If you're testing an idea, working with a handful of clients, selling something occasionally or simply trying to keep your monthly expenses as low as possible, you can find a workaround. But this is also where I start looking at the trade-off.
Because:
Saving money on your tech shouldn't create so much manual work that it makes running your business harder.
If you're ready to regularly sell digital products, collect payments and create a more seamless customer experience, we've reached one of those places where upgrading your technology may make sense.
With GetOiling, you'll need to move up to the Basic plan before you can accept payments directly through the platform.
And we'll get there in another article. Because once we start looking at everything available at the Basic level, we can start asking an entirely different question: How much of your tech stack could we potentially consolidate into one platform?
But that's not where this particular client is today.
What About Automation?
Remember how I said this client wants to streamline AND automate more of her business? Seed isn't going to give us all of the marketing automation capabilities we may eventually want. But that doesn't mean nothing can be automated.
We've already seen that with the booking system.
Appointments can get scheduled.
Calendars can be updated.
Reminders can go out.
Follow-up can happen.
Meanwhile, we're creating the foundation that future automation can eventually support.
We're creating somewhere for people to land.
We're giving them a way to join her list.
We're organizing her contacts.
We're creating a way for someone to book a conversation.
We're giving her somewhere to create and share valuable content.
We're simplifying how all of those pieces connect.
Then we add more automation when the business AND the budget are ready for it.
Build the Tech for the Season You're Actually In
This is probably my biggest takeaway from the conversation I had with this client... Your tech stack doesn't have to look like someone else's.
It also doesn't have to support the business you hope to have three years from now.
It needs to support what you're actually trying to accomplish today.
For this client, our question was:
If $9/month is what we have available for her tech budget, how much can we accomplish with it?
Quite a bit.
And if she reaches 100 contacts? Fantastic.
We've outgrown Seed.
If she starts selling consistently and manually collecting payments becomes cumbersome? Fantastic.
We've outgrown Seed.
If one landing page no longer gives us enough room for everything her business is becoming? Fantastic.
We've outgrown Seed.
If she reaches the point where more robust automations would save her meaningful amounts of time? Fantastic.
We've outgrown Seed.
Those aren't failures of the $9 plan.
They're signs that her business has grown beyond it.
And then we upgrade with intention.
Until then?
Use what you have.
Simplify the tech.
Build what you need.
And keep moving forward... Because you don't have to pay for the business you're hoping to build someday before you've actually built it.
AFFILIATE DISCLAIMER:
I’m a proud affiliate for some of these tools and products that are suggested on this page and throughout my site. Meaning if you click on a product and make a purchase, I may make a small commission at no extra cost to you. My recommendations are based on knowledge and experience and I recommend them because they are genuinely useful and helpful, not because of the small commission that I may receive.
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