From spreadsheets and a group chat to a portal that runs itself
Ladies Who Lit is a women-only book club and reading retreat with around 3,000 members. I built the member portal it now runs on.
The problem
Built for dozens, stretched to thousands
Bookings were typed into Google Sheets by hand. Retreat payments were tracked by hand. The community lived in WhatsApp. That works when there are a few dozen members. With thousands, someone is always checking whether a payment came in, chasing the ones that didn't, and answering the same question in a group chat for the twentieth time.
What I built
A member portal
Members join, manage their own membership, book retreats and see what they've paid and what's still due. They meet each other in a community hub instead of a group chat.
What runs on its own now
The admin nobody has to do
Welcome emails go out when someone joins.
Payment reminders go out before anything is due.
Bookings and payments are tracked without anyone typing them in.
AI watches the whole flow and flags anything that looks wrong.
Anything that needs a person is sent to the team as a push notification.
The result
What changed
Nobody types in data or tracks member events by hand any more. Members sort themselves out at any hour instead of waiting for a reply. The team hears about problems when they happen instead of finding them later, and the community lives next to the bookings and payments in a space the business owns.
What this means for you
Running something on spreadsheets and a group chat?
That's usually the moment to fix it. Custom builds start with a working prototype for £1,950.