Taking a small business owners Whatsapp group to an Online Platform

Technology and Digital platforms can have a huge how small business and communities scale & transform. At The Web Plant, we have always encouraged our customers, partners and communities to use digital platforms to scale by reducing redundancies in operations and increasing efficiency.

As part of this continuous effort, we were approached by NewAgeMomPreneurs - it's an expanding community of small business owners and everyone in the community is a mother and a business owner. So, this community is also a support group for the moms and has been specially supportive to its members when the pandemic stuck. Many members had a hard time balancing their business operations from home along with broken supply-chains and having kids at home all the time.

The community started out as a small group of less than 50 members and by early 2022, there were around 100+ members. All communication, subscriptions, lead generation and tracking was being done in a Whatsapp group. While Whatsapp is a great starting point to build a community, it can't be a collaboration platform for serious businesses. The members and community owners started to realize this very soon.

When they approached us with a few high priority items around referrals tracking and subscriptions management, we provided an immediate temporary solution by setting up a few automations through Google Sheets. This made sure that immediate data and operations were covered while we developed a permanent solution.

Moving on to a permanent solution, we created an online platform at namfam.in with following features:

1. Sign up new members with an approval workflow
2. Provide a unique login to each member
3. Self managed profile for each member with their bio, company bio, contact widgets and product catalog
4. Refer other members of community when a member come across a relevant lead or has a business/personal requirement herself
5. Add reviews and testimonials for members
6. Coordinate and host physical events where members put up stalls and showcase their products

The online platform has been a huge success and  the number of members has grown by 300% in just a few months.

New features are being added regularly and members are leveraging the platform in ways we had never imagined.