The right community building tools can be a game-changer. Sometimes a friend has recommended a tool that literally changes my life. The best tools have immediately helped me to make more money, save time and create a better experience for my community members.
My current favourite community building tools in 2023
Today I wanted to share my community tool-stack to help you. This collection of tools aren’t all strictly ‘community’ tools, but they all help me to run my community business more successfully.
They also took me literally years of trial and error to find. I hope this guide can be your personal shortcut to discovering tools that work for your community:
Circle.so
I had to put Circle first as it’s my all-time favourite community tool. I use Circle for Learn.Community as well as at my company Design Cuts. One of the reasons my tool-stack is so small (and cheap) is because Circle let me ditch all kinds of previous tools I was bolting together, and instead consolidate pretty much everything my community needs all in one platform.
With Circle I can:
- Share and host live calls/events for our members
- Host a thriving community forum
- Handle payments and subscriptions for members
- Get community analytics and insights
- Handle community automations/workflows (a new addition that I’m so excited about!).
Previously I was using around 5 platforms to do all this, so having everything working in one place as truly been a game-changer for me.
Chart Mogul
This tool was recommended by Learn.Community member Joselin recently and it’s been such a revelation for my reporting needs.
Stripe often provides confusing or inaccurate reports for my community revenue, whilst Chart Mogul probably pulls all of the data from Stripe and presents it in beautiful, accurate charts, graphs and tables.
It took literally minutes to set up, and best of all, it’s totally free up until you hit $10,000 in monthly recurring revenue.
I now rely on Chart Mogul for all my reporting needs, from MRR, to ARR, churn, growth rates etc…
Loom
I love Loom! It lets me record videos and/or screenshares in seconds. No downloading and uploading videos, once I’m done recording it immediately saves the video for me, and copies the video URL to my clipboard. It’s so efficient I’ll often leave our members detailed, personal video responses which take me less time to record than if I typed the response.
The results have been superb! Members love the personal touch that video brings, and I love the efficiency of just talking off the top of my head to help them.
Carrd
Carrd has been another recent addition to my tool stack.
Until recently, the landing page for my community has been a page on this blog (proof you don’t need a perfect sales page at the start).
However, I knew that I wanted to build something more professional looking than a blog post. When I asked inside Jay Clouse’s community for recommendations, virtually every person recommended Carrd. I knew I had to check it out.
I’ve been really impressed with Carrd so far. My landing page is about halfway done, but it’s been super intuitive to use. I’m a bit of a techphobe, so the simple drag and drop functionality has been a dream for me. Plus there’s tons of templates to use as a starting point (that don’t look ugly as hell!).
Convert Kit
I’m not going to lie, I was using Flodesk for ages for my email marketing, as I was on a ridiculously cheap $19 per month plan over there.
However, as my business has been scaling, it became too limiting for my needs. I knew that I had to find a more professional tool to help me scale.
Virtually every creator I respect uses ConvertKit, so I was excited to jump on the bandwagon.
So far, I’ve been seriously impressed. It let’s me easily create landing pages, setup email workflows and actually enjoy writing beautiful emails that my subscribers want to read.
I hope these community building tools help you
These tools continue to play a huge part in my community’s success. I hope that they can help you similarly.
My community costs are relatively lean, but the platforms I use are powerful.
Note: This article features affiliate links. I love using all of these platforms and do receive a small commission if you decide to try them out via my link.
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