Fragmented stack
Members, events, payments, email, Slack, Luma, CRM and analytics all lived in different tools that did not talk to each other.
Case study · Lovable Done For You
Led by Community: a full member platform, shipped with Lovable.
We built Led by Community a single platform that replaced eight disconnected tools and runs a member-led professional network end-to-end. Members, chapters, events, content, jobs, finance and an AI layer — all on one stack, built in months with Lovable and a layered set of integrations, and now run by a small team.
- 220+
- public-facing pages
- 230+
- backend functions
- 4
- Team Members Operating it
Who
Who is Led by Community
Led by Community is a member-led professional community for people who run communities themselves. It exists across multiple cities through local chapters, each with their own leaders, events and culture.
Membership is tiered — free and paid — with events, long-form content, a jobs surface, mentorship, partnership programmes and an AI-assisted ops layer behind the scenes.
The audience is operators. The bar for the platform is correspondingly high.
“Community and events, all in one place. Nothing scattered across tools — everything connected, everything where it belongs.”
Before
The problem space when we started
Manual ops
Welcoming new members, sending event reminders, chasing RSVPs, tagging Slack threads and reporting on engagement were all human jobs.
No single source of truth on people
The “who is this member, what have they done, are they active” answer required pulling four tabs.
Content sprawl
Blog, playbooks, wiki, podcast, newsletters, stories — all needed publishing, SEO, distribution and re-use, with very little time.
Events at scale
Chapter leaders needed to create events without breaking the brand or the data. Ticketing, check-in, reminders, post-event follow-up and feedback all had to be near-zero-touch.
Knowing what is working
No clean view of engagement, attendance, revenue or community health. Decisions were vibes-based.
The build
What we built, by area
Twelve surfaces, one platform. Each area below is a capability list — what the platform does for members, chapter leaders, staff and the public.
Stack
Integrations we wired in
Best-of-breed where it counts, glued together so members and staff never feel the seams.
Custom-domain email
Branded transactional and authentication email — scalable and deliverable.
Newsletter ingestion
Archive sync from an external newsletter platform.
Messaging & community
Slack (community)
Polls, surveys, digests, moderation prompts, intro onboarding and engagement signals.
Slack (ops)
Sprint standup, overdue reminders and weekly digests, cleanly isolated from the community workspace.
Web push
Native push notifications across devices.
CRM & data
Folk
Member, event and engagement signals pushed back into the CRM with attribution.
Gist
Visitor and member identification for marketing analytics.
Events
Luma
Bulk import, two-way sync, chapter tag sync and series registration sync.
Whereby
Virtual rooms for online events, with analytics.
Google Calendar
Calendar context for the AI assistant and morning briefings, scoped per user.
Productivity & docs
Gmail
Read, label, thread, send and draft flows for staff, with proper scoping.
Google Drive
Sprint document surface.
Media
Bunny
Video hosting, status refresh and deletion.
ElevenLabs
Article narration in a single locked voice for the blog.
AI
Unified AI gateway
Long-form writing, summarisation, classification, embeddings, image generation and structured extraction. One helper, one key, one error surface.
Gemini AI Models by Google
Member analysis, member matching, surveys and content generation — a single engine for intelligence across the platform.
Analytics & SEO
Google Analytics
Programmatic reporting.
Semrush
Keyword, SERP and competitive views surfaced to the editor.
Provesource
Social proof.
Payments & billing
Stripe
Paid memberships, event tickets, donations, paid job posts and customer portal.
Maps & places
Google Maps
Venue and chapter geo.
On a schedule
Automations and scheduled jobs
Recurring work runs without anyone touching a keyboard.
- Daily ticket sales report.
- Daily analytics summary.
- Daily new jobs post and weekly jobs digest.
- Event reminders, post-event feedback and recap follow-ups.
- Scheduled newsletters and scheduled polls.
- Subscription expiry checks.
- Slack intro onboarding runner.
- Sprint standup, midday and weekly digests.
- Embedding backfills and quality-evaluation cycles for the AI surfaces.
- Media library housekeeping and image reference updates.
Outcomes
Results
Result
8+
disconnected SaaS tools replaced with one platform
Result
~70%
weekly community ops time reclaimed
Result
200+
public-facing surfaces shipped in months, not years
The qualitative wins matter more than the numbers. Chapter leaders ship their own events without asking staff. Content publishes itself end-to-end. Staff get answers from the internal Copilot instead of from each other.
The offer
How we work — Done For You
Discover
We map your real workflow, your members and your stack in a single working session.
Build
We ship a working surface in days, not quarters, using Lovable as the build engine and the integration playbook we refined on Led by Community.
Operate
We hand over a system your team can run, with the AI layer that already knows your context.
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
Is this just a no-code site?
- No. It is a full application with a database, authentication, payments, scheduled jobs, integrations and an AI layer.
Do we own the platform at the end?
- Yes. You own the code, the data and every integration.
Can we extend it after handover?
- Yes. The same workflow you saw works for ongoing changes.
How long does a first version take?
- Typically two to six weeks for a working core, depending on scope.
Do you only build communities?
- No. The same engine works for associations, B2B SaaS customer communities, marketplaces, ops tools and internal platforms.