Community Ops Upgrade Cohort Application
Community Ops Upgrade is a five-week cohort that helps Circle community founders, and the community managers who run things for them, get their community operations working properly and keep them that way.
Each week is a one-hour workshop grounded in my client work, followed by an hour applying it to a community you work on, live on the call so that you have direct support throughout. I've built it all into AI skills you run yourself, with my best practices inside them.
You'll come away able to diagnose what's actually wrong, know what your community model needs underneath, build the automations worth building, and use AI confidently to support your operations. You'll gain transferable skills you can use on any community you work on, over and over again.
This is for both community founders and community managers. It works the same whether it's your own community or one you run for someone else.
- 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
- You've got something specific you want to build but 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
You don't need to be technical or to have used these tools before, and if you already build automations the exercises come in an advanced version too.
- You're looking for a quick fix for member growth or engagement
- You're looking for someone to come in and build it for you rather than learning how it works
- The community idea is still being developed or isn't yet launched
What you'll learn and build
Week 1 - Diagnose how your community should run
You know something's missing, but not what. You'll map how a member moves through a key part of your community, like applications, onboarding, offboarding or another part, and what should be happening behind the scenes at each step. That gives you a roadmap of what could be automated, what AI could support, and what should stay manual.
Week 2 - Get the foundations right for your type of community
Your community got built piece by piece over the years, and now it's held together with duct tape. Different community models need different things underneath them. Whether yours is 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 static automations you actually need
You know things in your community could be automated, but not which ones, or whether the job needs a Circle Workflow, a Zap or AI. You'll learn the difference between static automations and AI ones, and why the static logic comes first, because there's less that can go wrong and you need it straight before you start adding AI on top. Then you'll get into triggers and actions, how to pick the right tool for a job, and build and test something your community needs, live in the session.
Week 4 - Add AI where it makes sense
Once you're comfortable with static automations, AI is the next layer. You'll learn how AI can take work off you rather than just answer questions, and when to reach for Circle AI or Claude. Then you'll try it yourself, connecting your tools so AI can pull information out of your community, setting up scheduled tasks, and getting something running in the cloud without you. You'll also know the risks of using AI, and 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
By now a lot has changed, in what you know and in your community. 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 actually done and what's still worth doing.
Five weeks won't cover a whole community, but it will get a real part of it working properly, and leave you able to do the rest yourself.
"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
"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
"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
Who you'll be working with
Stephen is a Circle Certified Partner who has spent years diagnosing and building the systems behind Circle communities.
Through Automate Community he works 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 he builds it alongside them, so they can keep running it themselves.
Upcoming cohort information
Cohort 1 runs from Tuesday 10th November to Friday 11th December 2026.
Live workshops are on Tuesdays, 16:00 to 18:00 CET. (15:00 GMT / 10:00 EST / 07:00 PST)
Optional office hours are on Fridays for one hour. Come if you need extra help or want to catch up.
The exercises are meant to be finished inside the live sessions, but you can always carry on with them during the week if you need more time.
The founding price for this first cohort is £369, around $499.
Every session is recorded, and the recordings and resources sit in a Circle community. I'm in there through the five weeks as well, for questions between sessions. That support ends when the cohort does, and you'll keep the recordings and resources for a year.
What you'll need to participate
A Circle community that 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.
Claude on a Pro plan as a minimum. You can follow along with ChatGPT for a lot of it, though the week four exercises are built around Claude.
A free trial of Zapier. A new account comes with a 14-day trial of the paid features, so start that when we reach week three rather than before.
The prompts and skills you run will vary depending on your Circle plan and access to admin features.
1. Business plans and above can use Claude to pull information from your community. Some prompts still use Circle AI for the parts the connection can't reach.
2. Professional plans can instead use Circle AI to pull information from your community and paste it into Claude to process.
3. If you don't have admin access to a community, or can't use Circle AI, you can still gather what you need by hand and feed it back into Claude.
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 first session you'll get a checklist of what to have in place, so everyone starts from the same point and week one goes on the work rather than setup.
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, still fill in the application and mention it.
I'll email you and we can have a quick chat before you decide.