Soar Portal: Productizing the Marketing Platform

For most of MRB Media’s history, every client got a custom GoHighLevel build. Same platform, totally different setup per client. It worked. It also ate the margin on every engagement under $25K.

Soar Portal is the productization of that work — the same outcome, packaged.

What changed

The agency version: discovery call, scope doc, custom subaccount, custom funnels, custom automations, custom integrations, custom training. Six to ten weeks. Lots of professional services revenue, lots of attention.

The Soar Portal version: pick a tier, sign up, answer fifteen questions, get a working CRM with email/SMS automation, lead routing, and Stripe billing wired up the same day. Configurable, not custom.

What was hard

The platform was the easy part. GoHighLevel handles 90% of the back end out of the box. The hard part was the onboarding flow — getting from “I just paid” to “I have a working setup” without a human sitting on a Zoom call.

The version that works:

1. Stripe checkout fires a webhook
2. Webhook provisions a sub-account from a template
3. Customer gets a magic-link email to a setup wizard
4. Wizard asks fifteen questions, sets variables on the template
5. Confirmation email with what to do first

I tried the no-wizard version first. Customers signed up, got a fully-functional empty platform, and churned at month two because they didn’t know what to put in it. The wizard tripled retention.

What I’d do differently

Bake the wizard from day one. I wasted three months thinking the platform was the product. It wasn’t. The product is “here is a marketing platform set up the way someone who’s done this fifty times would set it up for you.” The platform is the delivery mechanism.

Also: charge more on the entry tier. The first version was priced for someone who wasn’t sure. Real customers paid more without complaint. Cheap acquisition only matters if cheap customers stick around, and they don’t.