The Newsletter that I started six months ago has about 1000 subscribers at the moment, with around 5% of them converting into paid subscribers.
I am trying to see how to ramp up on the value, and one of the options is to build a community on slack for the members, which will give it more stickiness.
There are a few tools like memberful but they charge extra - and the cost of the stack is starting to add up. I’m trying to avoid that.
I am thinking about building a small connector app that will do the following:
When a member subscribes to the newsletter, it will add them to the slack workplace (via an invite) - with an onboarding process in place.
via slack notifications + email, will send a reminder 3 days to the member before the subscription ends, to remind them to renew so that they can continue without interruption.
In the event that the subscription gets canceled, It will remove the user from the slack workplace. Also, there is a zapier trigger that sends out a feedback form to see how we can improve things and the reason as to why the person canceled the subscription.
(optional) there might be some folks who might want to trial the community, still wondering how to do that. I don’t have clarity on the workflow for that yet.
Before I get started, wanted to check if there was already a tool/project/github codebase out there which can do this and will save me time and energy. Ghost is already handling the payment+membership so don’t need something as feature-rich as Memberful (and pay for it).
Hey @vijayanands I’m in the process of creating exactly this idea. I also run a website and community where I have a private Discord/Discourse for paid members.
I’m about 80% of the way to getting something usable to manage Discord and Discourse. There are still some features that need to be added but I’m excited for it.
That’s awesome. Let me know if there is somewhere where I can take a look at it in action, and if you do plan to put it up. Will be happy to pay you a small fee for your effort.
@vijayanands@byadham awesome! I’ll let you know when it’s up. The Discord portion is working. I’ll reach out to @byadham and show you the demo. You can start testing it out. It’s working pretty well. Slack might take a good week or so.
Twitter is mighty noisy. Dont know if i want yo build a community there. That doesnt feel like a place to build anything meaningful - when everyone is just shooting and fleeing.
i was thinking about the functionality (pros and cons that way). search, threads, etc…
and onboarding friction. probably more folks are on twitter than on slack?
i use slack myself, never really seen twitter lists being used
Any progress on this front? It does look like, in order for the add user API in slack to work, we would have to upgrade to the Slack Pro version, which will be another 6$ per user per month.
I believe i looked at it. It adds members who are already part of the slack workspace, to a custom channel.
There are two different APIs that slack has - one that invites folks from the existing workspace to join a defined channel, and what we require which is adding/ inviting folks to the workspace itself.
That would become a security risk as the community grows.
You want to add individuals by email into the workspace (and remove them when the subscription is cancelled) else you are going to be constantly changing the link and making changes in the zapier process or you are going to end up with strangers who arent supposed to be in.
To do it the right way, you want to use the -admin.users.invite - API. And use the - admin.users.remove - API to remove them on subscriptions ending / cancelled.
Its neither about trust nor control. It is about fairness and keeping your community well managed.
If you are bringing in parts of your community into slack as part of a paid membership model, and folks come to know there is a backdoor to get in without paying the toll its being unfair.
Community engagements fizzle out quite fast and if someone genuinely has lost interest in your content, not renewing subscription is their way of gracefully bowing out. Else you arw going to over time, end up with a community with very little engagement.
The advice, “If you are gonna do it, do it right” holds
I see something like this as a key engagement driver for a large percentage of my members – mostly the professional members but also there is outreach to do with non-professionals. I have Paid memberships enabled on my Ghost site and would enjoy a direct membership integration between Ghost and RocketChat.
I am planning to set up a RocketChat/Jitsi (streaming to YT) instance to replace Slack and Google Meet/Zoom for my community. I don’t see Discord as being a viable option for my community.
It mentions there in the API itself that for the API to work, it requires the enterprise plan - “This API method for admins may only be used on Enterprise Grid.”
That is more or less my use-case as well. In my case, the audience (startup folks) are quite comfortable using Slack, but I could look at either using Telegram or Microsoft Teams, if they have an API. Im fairly sure Telegram has one - but the channels feature in Slack helps conversations get nicely categorised that Telegram doesn’t. But it could be a good alternative, I suppose.
