Fix the systems behind your Circle community (and learn to keep them working yourself)
Community Ops Upgrade is a five-week cohort for Circle community founders, or the community managers who run things for them.
It covers the admin that keeps your community running, from the moment someone applies to the day they cancel. That might be onboarding and payment chasing, or it might be member matchmaking, events, personalised learning pathways, or something that kicks in automatically when a member hits a milestone.
Whatever you're still doing by hand, you'll learn how to get more of it running without you, and how to keep it that way.
Runs from Tuesday 10th November to Friday 11th December
Live sessions on Tuesdays, 16:00 to 18:00 CET (15:00 GMT / 10:00 EST / 07:00 PST)
Optional office hours on Fridays, 16:00 to 17:00 CET
Optional Week 0 setup call on Friday 6th November, 16:00 to 17:00 CET
I'm keeping it to 20 people for this first one, so it stays small and intimate.
Open to Circle communities of any size, whether you're a solo founder or have a team. It just needs to have launched and have members coming through, and you need to know what your community does for your members.
Applications will close on the 20th October.
Each week is an hour's workshop drawn from my client work, then an hour applying it to your own community, live on the call with me there to help. I've built it all into AI skills with my best practices inside them, so you've got help putting each week's work into practice.
If you've never used AI before, that's fine. You just need a Claude Pro account, and I'll show you how to use the skills on a setup call before we start.
Every week comes with beginner and advanced exercises, so you can take part whatever your skill level.
What you'll come away with
- A map of how members move through a key part of your community, and what should be automated, supported by AI, or left manual
- The gaps between how your community is set up and what a community like yours needs underneath it
- Automations built and tested for the part of your community you've chosen to work on
- AI handling real tasks for you, and knowing what's safe to let it do on its own
- Ideas from real client builds, and from seeing what everyone else in the cohort builds for their own community
- A plan for what's still worth doing in your community, and skills you can reuse over and over, on any community
"I'm very selective with recommendations, but working with Stephen has profoundly impacted my business and community... His automations have saved me hundreds of hours."
Tom Ross, Learn Community (1:1 client)
The application to join starts at the bottom of this page.
- You're spending hours each week on the admin behind the community, and you know a lot of it shouldn't need you at all
- You can tell the community should be running better, but you're not sure what to change
- There's a specific automation or system you want to build in your community, but you don't know where to start
- The community has fallen behind what Circle can do now and you want to bring it up to date
- Things run well enough, but you want to work out where AI actually fits in your community
- You're looking for a quick fix for member growth or engagement
- You're not involved in the daily running of your community, and you don't want to learn how to build and maintain the systems yourself
- You're still working out your offer, or who your community is for
- Your community hasn't launched yet
"Stephen does the automation, but he also tells you what you should be building and why... The thing I didn't expect was how much I didn't know. I thought my onboarding was nailed. It wasn't."
Ernie Svenson, LawFirm Autopilot (1:1 client)
What you'll learn and build
(Optional) Week 0 - Get Claude AI set up, ready for the cohort
Friday 6th November, 16:00 CET to 17:00 CET (15:00 GMT / 10:00 EST / 07:00 PST)
We'll set up a folder of your notes for Claude to work from, add your connectors and check your privacy settings, then go through how to run the skills and talk back to the AI. It's recorded if you can't make it.
Week 1 - Diagnose how your community should run
Tuesday 10th November, 16:00 to 18:00 CET (15:00 GMT / 10:00 EST / 07:00 PST)
You know something's missing, but not what. You'll map how members move through one part of your community and what should be happening at each step. You come out with a roadmap of what to automate, where AI could help, and what should stay manual.
Week 2 - Get the foundations right for your type of community
Tuesday 17th November, 16:00 to 18:00 CET (15:00 GMT / 10:00 EST / 07:00 PST)
Your community got built piece by piece over the years, and now it's held together with matchsticks and duct tape. Whether it's a membership, freemium, a cohort or something else, we'll go through the best practice for that model and find the gaps in what you've got.
Week 3 - Build the automations you actually need
Tuesday 24th November, 16:00 to 18:00 CET (15:00 GMT / 10:00 EST / 07:00 PST)
You know things could be automated, but not which ones, or whether the job needs a Circle Workflow, a Zap or AI. We start with automations that follow fixed rules, because there's less that can go wrong and you need that logic straight before adding AI on top. Then you'll build and test automations your community needs, live in the session.
Week 4 - Add AI where it makes sense
Tuesday 1st December, 16:00 to 18:00 CET (15:00 GMT / 10:00 EST / 07:00 PST)
Once those automations are in place, AI is the next layer. You'll learn how it can take work off you rather than just answer questions. Then you'll connect your tools so it can pull information out of your community, and set up tasks that run on a schedule without you. You'll also know how to check what's safe to connect, safe to run, and safe to let it change on its own.
Week 5 - See what everyone built and what's next
Tuesday 8th December, 16:00 to 18:00 CET (15:00 GMT / 10:00 EST / 07:00 PST)
The last session is everyone showing what they built. No two communities in the room are the same, so you'll see the same frameworks applied in ways you wouldn't have thought of, and you share as much of your own as you want. You'll also put together a blueprint of where you started, what you've done and what's still worth doing.
Five weeks won't cover a whole community, but it will get a real part of it sorted, and leave you able to do the rest yourself.
"He didn't just fix things for us, he empowered us by showing us how to manage and improve systems ourselves moving forward."
Kristina Leroux, Nonprofit Marketing Guide (1:1 client)
Who you'll be working with
I'm Stephen, a Circle Certified Partner, and I've worked in community for around eight years. I first ran my own, then became a community manager, and for the last four years I've worked closely with over 50 communities as a community automation specialist on Circle.
I think Circle is one of the better community platforms, and the team behind it really care. It's easy for members to find their way around and connects well with other tools.
I first got into community as a hobby back in 2007, running a World of Warcraft community I set up to tackle the toxicity around group activities in the game. It became a supportive place where people helped each other out, and building it from scratch showed me how important the operations behind a community are, like the structure, the tracking and how people get onboarded.
These days, through
Automate Community, I work directly with founders to find the cracks in how their community runs and work out what to automate, where AI fits and what's better left human. Then I build it alongside them, so they can keep running it themselves.
Price and what's included
The founding price for this first cohort is £369, around $499. I've set it lower to make it more accessible, and it'll go up for later cohorts.
Each place is for one person. If you'd like to bring someone from your team as well, mention it in your application.
Every session is recorded, and the recordings and resources sit in a Circle community. I'm in there through the five weeks too, for questions between sessions. That support runs until Friday 18th December, but you keep the recordings and resources for a year.
The exercises are meant to be finished in the live sessions, but you can always carry on with them during the week if you need more time.
I can only invoice businesses for this cohort, for tax reasons at my end. That includes anyone who's self-employed, freelance or a sole trader and pays tax that way, as well as companies of any size. If that isn't you, apply anyway and I'll keep you posted about future intakes.
What you'll need for the cohort
1. A Circle community you know well, on any paid plan. You don't need to own it, and you don't have to change anything in it live unless you want to.
2. A Claude Pro account. Each week's exercises are AI skills you run in Claude.
3. A free Zapier trial. A new account comes with 14 days of the paid features, so start it when we reach week three rather than before.
How you pull information out of your community depends on your Circle plan.
- On Business and above, Claude can connect to it directly, with Circle AI covering the parts the connection can't reach.
- On Professional, you use Circle AI to pull it out and paste it into Claude.
- If you don't have admin access to a community, you can gather it by hand.
All three routes work and you end up in the same place.
The cohort price covers the sessions, the skills and my support. Tool costs are your own, including any Circle AI credits you use along the way.
Before the setup call you'll get a checklist of what to have in place, so we can spend the hour getting everything connected.
The questions below help me work out whether the cohort is a good fit for you at this stage. I read every one myself, so the fit works both ways.
If you aren't sure whether this cohort is right for you, fill in the application anyway and mention it in the last question. I'll email you and we can have a quick chat before you decide.