At Pory, we are huge believers in community, which is why we’ve put it at the heart of everything we do. In return, we’ve seen an influx of new customers through word of mouth, and support streamlined through the community itself.
This has enabled us to grow Pory with a near $0 Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC). 🤯
In this post, I want to share how we use Slack for discussions, Airtable for content management, and Pory for creating a go-to portal for our community.
Have another tool we should try out? Let us know! We are constantly improving our processes and the tools we use.
Why We Chose Slack
With over 10 million daily active users, Slack is a great platform for hosting discussions for our community. Chances are that our members already have it installed on their devices, making joining our community just a click away.
The best part? We can have as many users sign up for our Slack community without paying a cent.
EXCEPT when you need to access messages and files older than 90 days... This is the catch of running a community on Slack, which is why we also have a community portal built on Pory.
Our Slack Community
We have created several channels to organize conversations into dedicated spaces. At Pory, we aim to create a safe space for members to introduce themselves, as well as to share work and resources with other community members.
Channels we include are: #introductions, #resources, #help, #bugs, and #feature-requests.
The last two channels were created as a way for members to contribute to the development and future of Pory. This has helped improve transparency, customer success, and retention.
Growing the Community
A great way to grow the community is by adding the invitation link to the footer of your website and in your welcome email for new users. Businesses that successfully build a community around their brand often see higher engagement and conversion rates. Customers engaged in a community are more likely to develop brand loyalty, leading to repeat purchases and referrals.
Airtable for Content Management
While Slack is great for discussions, it isn’t ideal for content management. With a 90-day archive limit on free accounts and costly per-user subscriptions for larger groups, managing content becomes challenging. Airtable, however, is a fantastic solution for content management.
At Pory, we manage all our community-related content on Airtable and have transformed this content into a community site using Pory. This site is shared and bookmarked in Slack channels as a source of truth.
For example, in our #feature-request channel, members can visit our community site to see a full list of feature requests submitted by the community before posting a new one.
The feature request page, built using data from the 'Requests' table on Airtable, makes 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, allowing for cool functionalities like notifying the community whenever a new bug fix or feature is released. For our community, we’ve set up an automation that sends a Slack message to the #whats-new channel whenever the status in our Requests and Issue Tracker is set to “Done”.
Join our Community 🫶
Looking for tools to run your online community without spending thousands of dollars? Then consider Slack for discussions, Airtable for content management, and Pory for building a community portal as your no-code stack.
Come join Pory's community and let us know how you go!
