Creating a paid community platform, and making the subscription payments go directly to the owners of the communities.
Hello everyone, this time we are working on creating a platform for paid communities. A bit like substack, but instead of newsletters we just want to focus on a wall thread system.
Another thing we are doing differently is that payments would go directly to the user that creates and manage the community, so they keep 100% of the funds. For this we are considering letting the user enter his Paypal API credentials, this will allow registering when a payment is received from a user.
Is there a better way to do this? Or should we just go with the Substack way and receive the funds to later redistribute them? What is the best way to make this work for community creators?
Thank you.
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Sounds like a great idea.
My only suggestion would be to use something more creators have access to.
Many countries can't receive payments via Paypal or Stripe so I assume this method would basically exclude creators from these countries.
Not sure what the solution to this would be (I'm new to the coding world) but if there was some way they could also collect payments on a platform like this (maybe have options where creators could either collect directly or have payments collected on their behalf then deposited to their bank accounts), that would be splendid.
So many creators are being left out already with popular platforms like Gumroad so I think this is something new founders should take into consideration.
Best of luck!
Thank you. We always have the option to receive the payments on behalf of the community owner using for example Paypal, and then we could do payouts with other methods. Bank wire, Payoneer, Bitcoin Cash. What will work best for you?
I think the option to receive payments via bank wire and Payoneer should cover almost everywhere else.
Something like mighty networks or am I misunderstanding?
A bit more simple than mighty networks. There are actually lots of platforms like it, many of them open source:https://alternativeto.net/software/facebook/?platform=self-hosted
We are creating something very simple, the only feature that set it apart is that it lets the admin of a community add a paywall, so that users need to subscribe in order to join.
Neat idea. Community memberships can be a bit complicated though vs newsletter subscribers.
Newsletters/Substack: Just need the email mainly
Community: Usually based on certain constraints (skill, domain, experience level, geography)
So, would you handle: the member management, forms as part of payment.
If yes, that's similar to memberstack & memberspace.
There are also simpler solutions specifically to Slack based communities:
https://launchpass.com/
https://inviterobot.com/
Hope it helps :)
Thank you, interesting sites! I think we can make things extremely simple for a person that wants to create a small community and charge a small fee for users to join it. The user signs up, enters his paypal account and done. People can join the community after subscribing with Paypal. Money goes directly to the community owner.
Not sure if this is going to work to be honest. But then is a simple experiment, so will see what happens.
I'd probably use Stripe Connect. Marketplaces like that are exactly what it's designed for.
Stripe Connects looks very interesting, thank you!