What stage are you in with your community?
I see a lot of people here have been building their communities for over 6 months, and haven't lauched yet! (...and it kinda amazes me!) That's got me thinking: perhaps people are intentionally holding off the launch for some reason!?! 🤔
Because my impression so far is that the FlunetCommunity platform is indeed capable of launching a full-fledged community. (This community itself is the biggest example I know of!) Even if one wants to custom-develop a few things, it should be ready in 3-5 months.
So, if it's been over 3-5 months after purchasing FC Pro, I genuinely want to know what's stopping/holding you off from launching the community? Am I unaware of something that guys know!?! 🤔
Just to clarify, the purpose behind this post is to know if there are pre-launch things or tasks that are taking time for other community builders, and I may be missing out on them because I'm not aware of it!?! Or am I massively understating how long the process of building and launching the community should take in an ideal scenario?
I know this is quite a subjective matter. But I'm talking in a general sense where you just need to launch a community where members can join and interact and all.
It is a classic problem that people want everything to be perfect before they launch, when really, things are never perfect.
In fact, this can work hugely in your favour - you can encourage sign-ups by telling people they are getting a discount for being early adopters. They will have lower expectations and will actually help you build it by providing the best feedback.
One of the phrases I like is "Just make it exist first. You can make it look good later."
In fact, our first client's community went live before FC came out of beta... 😁
Jonathan Gwyer, I like your approach!
Jonathan Gwyer There you go! This is exactly what I've been thinking! To be honest, I myself get into "perfectionism" at times. But this time, I'm being very mindful of it. It's been about 1 and a half months since I bought FC Pro, and I want to launch the community as soon as possible. Maybe will take a few more days. So, overall, I'll launch in a couple of months, and then enhance it further later with members' feedback.
(I've once paid a big price for launching too late. Launching too late means you'll get feedback from real users/customers too late.)
Thanks so much for sharing your thoughts, Jonathan! It surely reaffirmed my belief. And yes, love that quote. <3
Jonathan Gwyer Launch anxiety is 100% a real thing. We've all had "you only get one chance to make a first impression" built into us and so we tweak and tinker and perfect so that there's no way that anyone could have a negative first impression.
Ross FCA Absolutely, but I think you are a great example of how we need to get over this...
I'm sure you'll take this the right way - you've been doing some amazing work, but until recently, your website has never quite been so... amazing 😉
To make it clear - your new site is really nicely done. Much closer to that perfection. But from your community's point of view, we've all been invested emotionally (and now financially) in your success. It's been what you're producing, not necessarily how you have presented it that has got us following you.
And rather than take that year perfecting your launch, you've built up a group of supporters/fans to help you now that you're ready.
Jonathan Gwyer Thanks for that. Prior to this I was working on SaaS products and living and breathing their mindset of "ship fast". These guys take payment from a landing page with promises and nothing else. It's all about seeking validation before soldiering on to a possible dead end. "Hey I'm going to solve this problem, does anyone else have that problem and would be willing to pay for it to go away?". If the answer is yes then you build it.
It's the whole chicken and egg thing - which comes first. Yeah you can go into hiding and then emerge with a fully developed product (or community) that you have already invested time and money in and potentially don't have an audience for. Or you can validate the idea, ship fast, get real feedback and respond to that quickly, grow the product along with your customers and spend less time stressing alone. If you get no response to your early versions, then maybe it's a sign of a lack of market.
My journey has been extremely organic so far and my community, whilst free, now has over 300 members. My plugins (the free ones) have over 2000 unique downloads (which seems to be a third of all users?!). That's given me the validation to now ramp things up, invest real money in it, and take it to the next level.
Jonathan Gwyer That's me, Soft Launch. I have a photographer's community in soft Beta still working on some of the nuances, especially when it comes to posted pictures and metadata.
I find the hardest thing, tbh, is the graphics, keeping a consistent look and feel, while illutrating the differences between the spaces. (Accountant here)
John Waters Are the graphics covers? As a last resort, you can ask ChatGPT to draw them, but I've put off illustrations for now and am testing with printed text.
John Waters Oh, yeah! I see! Just a couple of suggestions: 1. Use Canva if you haven't already. It's free and very user-friendly, even if you are not a graphic designer. It has tons of templates too. 2. You can hire a graphic designer on Fiverr at quite an affordable rate.
Hope that helps! 🙂
Artur Abakarov that’s what I’ve been doing then editing in Canva. There must be a better way to get chatgpt to keep consistent styling, I guess I’m answering my own question, need to work on my prompts.
John Waters Based on my experience working with one of my clients, who has a large federal-scale business, the images on his website were like stock photos, and the text left much to be desired. Then he asked me to hire a digital PR specialist for him. This employee created a very attractive design, graphics, and copywriter-level text for him. For this reason, I now don't waste any time on design, but only create meaningful content. Later, before the release, I will bring such a specialist onto my team so that he can resolve these issues at a high level.
Artur Abakarov wise words !
John Waters You might get better results with Google's Gemini. Nano banana is a crazy good image generator.
John Waters As Ross FCA said, check out Nano Banana. It should be able to handle consistent styling pretty well.
John Waters Start with the Icons for the spaces and links. Then create your banners. Focus on one area at a time and replicate the look and feel.
I created custom icons for mine, then I am focused on the banner images.
Kevin Watson These icons look awesome, Kevin! 😊👏
The GS WARNING: I tried Fiverr several times and each incident was a time-consuming failure! My conclusion is that each provider manages to obtain an image or two that is very impressive as a way of deceiving customers into thinking that they are very talented. My last provider was so, so bad. For example, I was working on a graphic to accompany my company name, Ascent Computing. The graphic was supposed to have a snowy mountain with clouds and the sun. My designer was so stupid and incompetent that in one iteration he drew the sun IN FRONT of the mountain and clouds. Moreover, because English is not their primary language, communicating becomes difficult; it compounds the time required. Don't believe anything from them and definitely don't use Fiverr.
The GS The goal is to be consistent. That's why I suggested to start in one place first, then design for the next place. I wanted to design icons that could be visually figured out, then move to the featured and open graph images.
Open Graph images provide a custom preview for a webpage when its link is shared on social media platforms so it requires a different size then the featured images. That's why they include both for uploading in space settings.
For the side menu, I added css to make the icons a little larger and added custom color to the background of highlighted spaces in the left menu. This worked for me, maybe not for everyone. Here is the CSS I used:
change background color of current space in menu:
.spaces .space_contents ul li a.router-link-exact-active {
background-color: #2a0c5f;
}
change padding of menu items in left menu:
.spaces .space_contents ul li a {
padding-top: 8px;
padding-right: 0px;
padding-bottom: 8px;
padding-left: 5px;
}
change size of icon in menu items in left menu:
.spaces .space_contents ul li a .community_avatar {
max-width: 30px!important;
height: 30px!important;
aspect-ratio: 1 / 1;
}
Kevin Watson nice! was going to ask about the icon sized lol. Did you use Canva ?
John Waters Oh no..... I am old school with this stuff. I am an Adobe Creative Cloud guy.
I've launched the course part to but have not gotten into the community discussion posts side just yet. I'm currently in imposter syndrome not the problem with FC. But that said, seeing how a few others have setup theirs is helping me.
Janice Bennett You got this, Janice!
See, community building is all about making others a part of your journey. You can have community members who know more than you, and that's okay. We learn from each other in the community.
I wish you all the best! ♾️
I've been working on my site for almost 9 months and it is scheduled to go live in late January. The extended timeline is due to external factors (other related systems being upgraded) more than the work needed to get it ready. We're doing a good bit of customizations which take time but I could have finished those by now were it not for the external factors involved.
Thomas Oates Yeah, totally get it, buddy! And I'm pretty sure you're doing "a good bit of customizations"! And I haven't forgotten that you've helped do customizations as well! 😊🙌
And yeah, I kind of missed considering this aspect of external factors. Also, for some people, the main business could be something else, and the community might be just an extension to that business.
Okay, let's get real — one of the reasons behind this post was that I kinda started worrying a bit when I realized people haven't launched even after 6+ months. I started thinking like, am I doing something prematurely? 🫣
We’re waiting for some fundamental features that are necessary for a community platform, e.g., change email, change password, 2FA, image meta-data sanitizer, and user data exports.
Karl Emil Nikka, you can already implement some of the features using the FluentAuth plugin. For example, you can change your password using the "forgot password" feature. If necessary, you can enable 2FA not only for the administrator but also for subscribers.
To be able to change your name and email address, you need to check the appropriate boxes in the FluentCommunity privacy settings.
Artur Abakarov Yes, there are some workarounds. FluentAuth doesn’t offer real 2FA since the verification codes are sent to the same email address as the password reset email. I didn’t know there was a way to enable support for changing email address. Thanks for letting me know.
Karl Emil Nikka The user's email address is their sole responsibility. For now, please accept it as a working option. I wish you the best of luck with your project!
Karl Emil Nikka Same. Just basic stuff for users to do without me having to pitch in manually and that are simply required. No workaround should be needed.
Biggest hold up me is no custom field support. I already have a community site that is working fine (Peepso) but want to move to FCOM as it's newer and is a much better base for customization (simpler code, database structure, etc). But without custom fields, I can't go live yet. My members need to be able to put in gender, DOB, and other personal info, and that's just not possible yet with FCOM.
Vigi1ante I like the lack of noise in the interface, nothing superfluous. And the option not to specify gender is a plus, less controversy. xD
Artur Abakarov We need a choice though. I run academic communities and need simple things like University, area of research, publications etc. Potential community topics are endless and will all require their own set of custom profile fields for their own needs.
Ross FCA I understand... I just left BuddyBoss because of its desire to be everything at once, and in the end, nothing...
Artur Abakarov Really? My issues with BuddyBoss is it wasn't trying to be anything. It was just a BP fork and a half decent theme. Every other bit of functionality had to come from "integrations". Now they're trying to release their own features and charge you extra for the privilege 😅
Vigi1ante I’ve moved groups over from bb while keeping bb profile fields.
Of all the people still waiting - Do you offer a free membership level or are you waiting to launch a paid community? If you're looking for a bit of help I put together a campus map that you are free to download. https://trainingsites.io/members/course/map/lessons
The thing holding me back is not really having an audience yet. I know that what I'm doing would be useful to loads of people, but I haven't really figured out how to advertise it successfully to students without forking out a bunch of money.
Ultimately, I am also waiting for FluentCart to integrate with more things, too, as I run a Moodle instance for my courses and I would like people to be able to buy the courses through my website. At the moment, they can via Woocommerce, but I want to ditch that bloated ecosystem as soon as I can.
Although if I could, I would just use the courses here on FC. The only problem is that I'm an arts and humanities educator, so I need students to be able to type long-form answers in quizzes, and submit assignments. If I could switch completely to FC in terms of courses, I could ditch Moodle altogether and be happy. Maybe if I could add online events to courses, too.