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Kyle Wood

Strategic Coach

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BootCraft

5 year project

Daily · November 25, 2020

Today, a little group fitness workout web app I created called BootCraft, turns 5 years old.

Creating things on the internet is strange because there is always a bit of a disconnect between yourself and the people who are using the thing you created. I really appreciate the odd email or comment that floats into my inbox from a trainer who uses BootCraft telling me how much it helps them with planning their sessions.

Here are 5 things I’ve learned in these past five years running a membership/SaaS website:

  1. Elevate the super users. Pay attention to who is being most helpful and helping to lead the community. Give them more responsibility and encouragement.
  2. Price for your market. The trend out there is to charge more and more for what you offer, but not all audiences are looking for the most expensive option. Know your audience, know what they’ll pay and price accordingly.
  3. Start with an MVP. An MVP is a Minimal Viable Product. Your site doesn’t need to have all the bells and whistles to begin with. Start with the most basic thing it needs to do and just create then. Then keep shipping updates and improvements based on how people actually use what you’ve created.
  4. Focus on doing one thing really well. Signing up to a new site only to be inundated by features, courses and lessons is a good way to feel overwhelmed. I always wanted BootCraft to be just about the workout ideas. That determined the design and what we focused on content wise.
  5. But keep testing things. That said, you do want to keep testing new features and content in the background so that you can keep innovating and getting better.

The tools I use to create BootCraft

Daily · November 21, 2020

Thanks to the number of amazing SaaS products out there online, creating a really great website isn’t the crazy tech nightmare that it was even just 10 years ago.

It seems that better and better products are coming out all of the time. Which is closing that gap between website creation only being for full time web designers and something that anyone who can click a mouse can do.

5 years ago I created the website BootCraft by myself using some of these tools. I still maintain and create anything new on there today. In this post I thought I’d share what exactly is under the hood of the membership area.

I run on WordPress hosted by SiteGround and with a theme from StudioPress. I heavily customised the site with help from Toolset and custom CSS.

Memberful powers my sign up process, takes payments and handles the membership security.

Circle is a new addition which powers the community area so we can move off of Facebook Groups. I was using Intercom for chat but it wasn’t getting used much so we’re trying out the new community area.

ConvertKit handles the bi-monthly newsletter. Also thanks to Memberful syncs up who on my mailing list is a member and who is not.

Some useful WordPress plugins I use for this site are PrintFriendly for PDFs, Thrive Architect for extra customisations and WordPress Popular Posts for trending items.

BootCraft uses more tools and plugins than other sites I have, but that’s because it needs to do more and it needs to do something unusual (search a database of group fitness workouts). You don’t need all of these tools to make your own website. In fact many new platforms will handle your email, website and membership site so you don’t have to worry about all this stuff.

The point of this article is twofold. 1) So that I can look back in the future and see what I was using if anything ever changes and 2) to hopefully show you that if I can do it, anyone can, you just need some determination and tools.

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