No-code Community Platform & Courses
Use a community page to lock in retention and build customer loyalty
Welcome! We’ve received requests about community-focused apps so we wanted to dedicate a post for our favorite community platform.
If you haven’t seen our tweet about communities (LINK), please do. You’ll understand why communities are great additions to apps, and reversely, why a product or app is needed for a community.
We’ve also noted how niche communities are increasing. People are tired of huge networks with millions of ideas and interests. Instead, people want to be included in smaller communities with like-minded interests (BowTied!).
Benefits
Before we get into the platform itself, we want to quickly go over the benefits of having a community aspect to your business.
Retention: By having a community portal, you’ll actually lock in members and have higher retention rates. Members will feel like they’re a part of the product.
Network: Members will interact with each other and create relationships they couldn’t have otherwise. Again, this will increase retention as people are happily to pay for a product that brings them closer with other individuals of the same interests.
Feedback: As the founder being an active member in the community, you can illicit feedback right away from your member base. Thinking about releasing a new feature? Throw out your thoughts in the community and gauge interest. Just released a new feature and want feedback? Ask! Use your member base to grow your business and iterate on what is and isn’t working.
Let’s talk about *some* downsides: If you have a community, you’ll want to make sure it’s active. If people see or perceive a community as inactive, they’ll be turned off right away. So when you’re first starting out, find incentives to keep users active. Host giveaways (top 5 active members get X), add ranking, gamify, or whatever else is necessary. Also, with a community, you’ll have to dedicate time in managing it and being active. Once it takes off and “lives on its own,” you can think about hiring a community manager or admin to take care and maintain it.
Our Recommendation
If you’re thinking about including a community area for your business, our recommendation is to use Circle (LINK). Circle is a modern platform founded in 2020 with entrepreneurs and creators in mind. It’s received $5.5MM in funding (LINK) with some great backers. I use Circle for two of my businesses and can personally vouch for how great and convenient the platform is.
Breaking down Circle: Within Circle, you can create “Spaces” which allow you to organize topics. Then, you can create “Space Groups” which allow you to categorize spaces. So for a DeFi space group, you’d have spaces such as Airdrops, Mining, Staking, Farming, and so on.
In the example above, “Community” is a space group, while all of the topics below are spaces.
Posts: As the name suggest, a post is basically a forum post. Members will be able to create posts within a space. Posts can include text, images, videos, and more. Of course, other members will be able to like and comment on posts.
Member Management: Circle provides admins with an intuitive dashboard for managing members and more. You’ll see things like member count, active members, stats on posts and much more. The dashboard is great to gauge how your community is performing and growing.
Notifications: Members can receive in-app and email notifications for posts and comments. Also, you can automatically have Circle send digests to members with community updates. Again, this is all off-the-shelf and requires no programming!
Domains & White label: Circle allows you to connect your own domain and white label the product (complete branding). This means that community members won’t even know they’re using a third-party service. You would simply set up a DNS setting for your domain, something like ‘community.yourdomain.com’.
Check out Circle and see if it’s right for your business. You can head to the documentation area to get in-depth details about the product. We’ve been using Circle for just about a year now and it’s quite incredible how fast they release new features. Also, their customer service is outstanding if you ever run into any issues.
Bubble, Circle, or Both?
In our opinion you should use Bubble *and* Circle if it makes sense. Let Circle handle the community aspect of your business while Bubble handles the “app” portion. For some of you, using Circle might be enough and that’s fine. However, if you incorporate an app into your business model, you’re more likely to retain members as they ultimately receive more value. Circle also just released a payments feature, so you can paywall space groups. If you use Bubble, you would take payments through Bubble and decide if the community is for paid members or open to all members.
Integrating with Bubble: If you’re interested in integrating Circle & Bubble, you have two options:
Manually add users to Circle: This method would be tedious. Basically, a User would pay for your product through Bubble and you would need to manually add them in the Circle app. It should be easy when you first start out, but as the community grows, it’s better to automate this.
Integrate SSO (Single Sign On): You can integrate SSO which allows Users to easily navigate to the Circle right from your Bubble app. If your community is for paid-only members of your app, you would simply hide or disable a “community” button in Bubble if the User is on a free plan. To integrate Circle with Bubble, follow the steps outlined here.
Closing Remarks: Circle is truly first-class for niche communities. It has everything you need and more for a community based platform. Do your research and see if Circle is right for your business.
Supplementary Courses
As we mentioned in our previous post, some of you have asked for supplementary learning content. We’ve established an agreement with Nocodify (Link) and they’ve agreed to provide BowTiedVampire readers with a 30% discount. With Nocodify, you’ll get tailored tutorials and playlists about building specific features for your app. While we’ll cover many of these use cases here in this Substack, you can get a head start with Nocodify.
If you’re serious about learning no-code, it’s helpful to learn from many sources. The ROI for web development is huge.
Currently, Nocodify offers a lifetime plan for $99. With the 30% discount, you’ll get lifetime access to all tutorials & features for $69.00 (Lol).
To get the discount, you’ll need to:
Head over to Nocodify (Link)
Purchase the lifetime plan ($99)
Email info@nocodify.com saying you’re a BowTiedVampire reader. Please note the email you used to sign up for Nocodify.
They will issue a 30% refund
Disclaimer: BowTiedVampire is not affiliated with Nocodify. We do not receive affiliate commission from them. Any issues you have with the Nocodify platform will need to be handled with them and not us. We do vouch for Nocodify, however, as they’ve been around for 2+ years and have a good reputation in the Bubble community.
Closing Remarks
Now that we’ve covered our recommendation for integrating a community aspect to your business, we’ll transition back to developing with no-code in Bubble.
In the next issue, we’ll cover Monetization, Stripe, and taking payments in Bubble. This is an extremely important topic as your goal *should* be to create a second income stream and generate revenue. Stripe is hands down the best payment processor for online entrepreneurs. If you don’t have a Stripe account created for your business, go ahead and create one now so you’re ready for the next issue (Stripe.com).
Next, we’ll build the sample project step-by-step with you right here in this Substack (LINK). The sample project will entail a simple landing page, access accounts, chat, invoicing/billing, booking sessions, and more. It’ll be a complete consulting/freelancing management portal that you can use as a base for any of your consulting businesses.
We’re going back to paid posts for the sample project. Subscribe for $5/mo to see how we approach building the consulting portal - your future self will thank you.
Have a great weekend, Anon.
-BowTiedVampire