At Pory, we are huge believers of community which is why we’ve put it at the heart of everything that we do. In return, we’ve seen an influx of new customers come through word of mouth and support streamlined through the community itself. This has enabled us to grow Pory on a near $0 CAC. 🤯
In this post, I want to share step by step on how you can get your own community up and running in minutes using Slack for discussions, Airtable for content management and Pory for creating a community website. Have another tool we should try out? Let us know! We are constantly improving our processes and tools of choice.
Slack for Community Discussions
With 10+ million daily active users, Slack is a great platform for hosting discussions for your community. Chances are your end users already have it installed on their devices and joining your community is only a click away. The best part is you can have as many users sign up to Slack community without having to pay a single cent.
Creating an Account
- Sign up to Slack
- Create a new work space
- Give your workspace a name e.g. PoryHQ!
- Invite your team
- Create your first channel
That’s it! You now have a Slack community ready to go 🙂
Creating channels
Channels are a great way to organise conversations into dedicated spaces. At Pory, we want to create a safe space for members to introduce themselves as well as share work and resources with other members of the community.
You can add channels by clicking on the Add Channels button — we’ve included #introductions, #resources and #help.
We also wanted to create a way for members to contribute to the development and future of Pory. We created the channels #bugs and #feature-requests to allow members to report bugs and request features they would like to see. This has helped Pory improve transparency, customer success and retention.
Inviting Members
Click on Add teammates from the sidebar to copy your invitation link.
Share this link with your users and start growing your community.
Airtable for Content Management
While Slack is great for discussions, it however isn’t great for content management. Under the current terms, there is a 90-day archive on free accounts and paying a subscription becomes costly as it requires paying per user (imagine having over 1,000 members). To combat this limitation, Airtable is a great solution for content management.
At Pory, we manage all our community related content on Airtable and turned the content into a community site using Pory. This site is then shared around and bookmarked in channels on Slack as a source of truth.
For example, in our #feature-request channel above, members can go to our community site to see a full list of feature requests submitted by the community before posting a new one.
The feature request page is built using data from the table Requests on Airtable, making it incredibly easy to keep everyone up to date on statuses.
We’ve collected content for each channel on Slack and created an accompanying page in our community site for members to use. This has proven to be our favourite method for running our online community.
Automating Processes!
Both Slack and Airtable support workflow automations which means you can do really cool things like notifying the community whenever a new bug fix or feature is released. For our community, we’ve set up an automation to send a slack message to the channel #whats-new whenever the status from our Requests and Issue Tracker is set to “Done”.
Conclusion
Looking for tools to run your online community without spending thousands of dollars? Then Slack for discussions, Airtable for content management and Pory for building a community website could be the no-code stack for you.
Let us know how you go or share your community with us! You can check out our community site for Pory here.