Hey Ryan + Vedika!
As I (Yash) build this hub for Weekend Fund's founders + LPs, I'll document my thought processes here — both for myself to have a cohesive train of thought, as well as for you to see how my brain works.
"A “home” where members can congregate and interact and events or activities that are useful and engage more passive members"
I've used quite a few community platforms (Circle.so, Tribe, etc etc). When it comes to communication, I'm stuck between Slack and Discord, but at the end of the day, the 🏆 goes to Slack — primarily for the integrations over anything. Also noted that members of this community are founders and investors, unfortunately the two types of busiest people in the ecosystem. As such, we want to keep this as low friction as possible.
I've gone down the thought process of "if we keep our community on a specialized platform, members will be incentivized to check it more and it would be differentiated from other communities they may be a part of."
So, that didn't work out. I compare it to the streaming services we have nowadays. Of course you have Netflix. Maybe even Hulu. But after that, you choose your platform subscriptions based on the shows available on that platform. Big fan of The Office? Only then would you get Peacock. GoT binge-watcher? Maybe HBO is a good fit.
Point being, I doubt that WF members would prefer a separate platform. Additionally, if we can keep things static with what you (Ryan and Vedika) are using, if it ain't broke. Slack it is.
It's more likely that our founders will stay quiet in Slack, focusing on product growth more than interacting with other founders who may not even be in the same vertical. There needs to be a hub — a portal of sorts for both founders and LPs to engage with each other — streamlining the process for portcos to have an 'ask', which can be redirected to the appropriate LP.
Now, investor updates aren't that great at the moment. The founder shoots over an ask, mentioning they may need an intro to a specific company, or need advice on design. That sits as a PDF or email in the investor's inbox for eons.
The incentive should be "I'm helping out my portfolio founder which will directly benefit their success", yet it simply doesn't happen. Why? They forget. They genuinely can't. They may not think the intro they make will actually amount to anything.
More than a platform, it's a WF-exclusive marketplace for LPs and portco founders to help each other.
In regards to the stack, we built something similar at Contrary for our Fellows and Venture Partners to understand events + more. Using code obviously makes things easier, but using no-code Airtable is quite easy and looks great. Softr.io and Pory.io look solid, as does Flairtable.com.
Using Softr, you can transform a DB into a web app.
In the case that an Airtable-oriented stack does not work out, this document (as I'm sure you've realized by now) is hosted on a Notion hub, which is easier to maintain, but less white-label and less impressive as a whole, you may agree.
Once the web app is finished, we invite all LPs and portco founders. If members of either party do not join, we follow-up. It would be ideal, of course, to have high engagement levels on this portal with the added benefit of one clear database of all the fantastic members in the WF community.
I've seen great success first-hand with having a 'Shopping Week', a time period in which there are a surplus of events, all packed into one week. Folks are encouraged to meet each other, we host a number of events with members of the community + more, etc. At Contrary, we used this week every time we onboarded a new cohort of Fellows or Venture Partners (which happened every quarter or biannually). Now, this concept would have to be modified to work with WF — there's going to be a large majority of the community that is passive, and we need to work with that.