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28 Comments

What's your community tech stack?

For those building communities, what is your tech stack?

And why have you chosen to go down the route you have?

  1. 11

    IH is custom built! Basic web technologies: HTML, CSS, and JS. Frameworks and platforms: Ember.js, Node.js and Express, Firebase, Cloudflare, Render.

    Went this route early on mainly because I wanted to have fun tinkering with the kinds of code I was interested in writing at the time. But also largely because I'm a control freak and I wanted my own branding and custom features with no limitations.

    1. 6

      And the site feels so great!

    2. 2

      Suprised you did all css from scratch. Super aesthetic design too, not just the code!

    3. 1

      do you think Firebase is expensive?
      would you recommend it for a new small scale SaaS?

  2. 3

    I'm using https://dupple.com, which is the only community platform really made for startups and saas I've found. So far, I'm really impressed by the platform and the team has been super responsive to my feature requests.

    Before that I've benchmarked Tribe, Discourse, Slack... but they were too expensive or not really great looking nor convenient :/

    Here's my thoughts on some of them:

    Tribe:

    • made for big companies with a starting price at $100/month if you pay monthly.
    • free for the first 100 users, but then you'll be trapped: pay 100 bucks each month or go somewhere else?
    • not made for startups and projects
    • sooooo slow

    Discourse:

    • not good looking
    • painful to install
    • doesn't have a lot of social/community features

    Slack:

    • If you do not pay $7/user, Slack will only keep the last 10,000 messages, which means you will lose all your content after some time - which sucks.
    • The content is not indexed on search engines, which means your users will keep asking the same questions and you will lose time.
    • It's a chat, so it can be very hard to catch up with conversations if you're not super active in the community.
  3. 2

    For most of it's 7+ year life, Folyo, my referral community for freelance web designers and agencies has existed as a mailing list, exclusively.

    That was enough to generate six-figures on it’s own. My “community” was basically like a paid newsletter before Substack was a thing.

    Then I experimented with a discussion list using an app called Groupbuzz a while back and that worked great.

    It actually helped increase conversions on top of being a value-add. However, I shut that down because it started getting expensive.

    Then a few years later I ended up creating a Slack group to use for discussions instead. That has gone well for all the reasons Slack is good but as it’s grown it’s become really hard to manage.

    So right now my community's tech stack looks something like:

    • ConvertKit
    • Stripe / Gumroad
    • Website Hosting
    • Slack

    I also have an intake form which asks members onboarding questions and that works really well.

    I use Google forms for this and it pipes answers into Slack using Zapier.

    However, as mentioned it's become a bit hard to manage and I’m now getting ready to launch my own solution for the community element.

    It's an app I'm building called Inter which I will be using for my communities from now on. (If any IndieHackers want to take a look feel free to ping me for a beta invite).

    I wanted something more like what IndieHackers has because the problem I ran into with Slack was that discussions were gone before they could become a resource.

    Everything members contribute gets lost in Slack’s conveyor belt.

    I found it wasn't easy to create your own Hacker News / IH, despite a lot of people asking for that very thing.

  4. 2

    I'm using Circle for discussions, but below that I have a custom OAuth Provider which is powered by Firebase. This allows me to give members a single login for both the website and forum. Below that, I'm using Gatsby, Material UI, Mailgun, Cloud Functions, and deployed on Google Cloud Platform.

    I use ConvertKit for email, mostly because Circle doesn't have its own email broadcast system built-in.

    I'm not sure if one day I will need to migrate away from Circle. The platform itself is nice, though as a developer I love customizing things a little too much 🤓

  5. 2

    For my project, Learningin.tech, I am using Discord because I found it is quickest to setup.

    1. 1

      Would you be interested in signing up for a beta of https://qmux.io? I'd love to hear how you might want to schedule content and setup delivery.

      1. 1

        The community is not that big enough to use such tools but I will keep it in mind :)

        1. 2

          Thank you for the consideration :)

  6. 1

    How long did it take to build IH's forum/community portion? This is exactly what I've been looking for.

  7. 1

    Hi, welcome to try our product, an open-source and completely free Q&A community software written in go. https://github.com/answerdev/answer

    You can use it to quickly build your Q&A community for product discussion, customer support, user communication, and more.

    Answer.dev was just launched a while ago, on Oct. 24, and we would appreciate it if you have any comments and feedback for us.

  8. 1

    Oh no! I just posted something asking this same thing! haha

  9. 1

    Twitter + email list

    That's all I really need.

    1. 1

      what do you use for the email list? where do people subscribe?

  10. 1

    my comprehensive tool / website list... if it "touches" the community at all... i include it:

    • wordpress x2
    • twitter x2
    • substack x2
    • youtube x2
    • indie hackers! — 3 prod, 1 profile
    • startup school
    • product hunt / SHIP
    • slack groups x5
    • circle x2 (makerpad, vc firm group)
    • notion
    • tiktok
    • YEN
  11. 1

    A glideapp with all my events + kumospace

  12. 1

    I use Mighty Networks. It is not cheap, but it is compatible with Zapier which was important for me. I create content in Mighty Networks and zap it out to my mobile app.

  13. 1

    I decided to launch my accountability & audiobook club community (community.makemanymoves.com) in Tribe.so. The gamification was key to the type of experience I wanted to build.

  14. 1

    Qbix Platform allows you to spin up a community site very easily.
    https://qbix.com/platform

  15. 1

    I am currentely building getlearningstory.com - community for people who learn in public.

    I've decided to go simple and chosen the stack I know well: RubyOnRails + some JS magic. And Tailwind for visual.

    I am building it completely from scratch. That way I will have flexibilty on changes.

  16. 1

    For the audience I'm working with, I went with LinkedIn.

    The community is called Designer Hired and it's for job-seeking/gig-hunting designers.

    1. 1

      is Linkedin working for you?

  17. 1

    I managed to build a circle.co clone in Bubble and blend it with my fav features from other platforms - Pop in and have a look Rosie

    buildcamp.io.

  18. 1

    I know @momoko is building a community. Maybe you wanna share your stack.

    1. 1

      Yay thanks for the tag :)

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