December 2023

Community Chat Platform Development

Memberset is a chat platform for hosting free or paid (via subscription) communities. The product is designed for creators, gamers, influencers, professional organizations, web3 communities, and people who enjoy niche online communities.

Product Development Services

Product Development & Fullstack Development

Platforms

iOS App, Android App, Web App, & Website

Project Results

25K+

hours of coding and QA testing

Project Overview

Memberset was an ambitions project that aims to replace multiple systems with one simple, easy-to-use interface. The Memberset platform is a competitor to Discord, Slack, Memberful, Patreon, and more. The entire platform was built with the the goal of removing complexity from competing platforms to make it intuitive to manage a community.

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Discovery

Initial workshops focused on clarifying the product vision, identifying the core problems, envisioning solutions, and aligning on a unique value proposition. Then, we mapped each problem into human-centered objectives/outcomes that ultimately determined the core user experience.

With a clear understanding of the product vision and core functionality, the discovery phase branched into work-streams focused on idea brainstorming, feature mapping, user journeys, requirements definition, platform research, and project scoping.

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The Problem

With the rise of online communities for nearly every niche, finding a community that suits your interests is easy. But Discord is complicated and doesn’t have native community member subscriptions. In addition, setting up a 3rd-party payment dashboard to integrate with Discord requires some technical skills. Our client believed there had to be a better way. So we helped them develop their platform where members can connect in one place, and community owners can collect subscriptions easily.

The Solution

As community owners, the client had grown tired of the manual processes of keeping track on members and reconciling payments. This frustration made our goals clear:

Design and develop a platform similar to Discord with integrated payments
Support Discord bots with minimal coding or changes from the developer
Build the platform in less than one year with sleek design and powerful features
Create a analytics dashboard for tracking member payments, refunds, and more
Automatically, generate community website landing pages

We started the project by the outlining User Flows and User Stories for the project team. After the stories and project outline was completed we worked closely with our UI/UX team to produce wireframes and a modern design concept.

Project Execution

We partnered with Memberset for more than 1 year to build an platform that enabled the team to validate their product idea, onboard their first 500 communities, and showcase the application to investors. Leveraging our expertise in software development, we built the applications using a project management Agile Framework called “Flights”.

Project meetings were held twice a week. The client’s product manager, the design manager, our project manager and our the development manager participated in the meetings. At the meetings, we discussed the flights/tasks, added features to the backlog, and checked with the flight-plan for the coming week. This structure allow our collaborative team to deliver features in a truly continuous and lean way as opposed to other frameworks like Scrum and Kanban which focus on iterations.

Architecture

By leveraging best-of-breed technologies and only building proprietary tech where essential, Memberset was architected with a massive amount of initial core functionality for a first-build platform. Then, with multiple modern API-based platform integrations connecting to Memberset, we architected the system using distributed infrastructure into a cohesive backend structure. Finally, with the architecture mapped out, we created sequence diagrams and data flow documentation to define how features would work within the system.

Development

We developed Memberset's core functionality with a mix of serverless functions, 3rd-party integrations, and cloud databases. The mobile apps were developed using Swift and Kotlin to build native iOS and Android applications. The responsive web application was developed with Next.js as the core React framework and a host of modern web technologies.

Data

We used an object/action framework to establish clean, consistent, and well-structured data. Even though data flows across multiple platforms, it is routed through integrated data pipelines to centralize in Memberset's data warehouse. This framework enabled data-driven reporting and insights for goals towards KYC, core product engagement, community owners' analytics dashboards, and Memberset's KPIs.

Project Results

Memberset is a platform for public and private monetized communities. It combines the functionality of other popular platforms into a single, easy-to-use tool. The entire platform is architected to remove complexity and to make it intuitive to manage an online community.