Hey I'm Ian 👋! I am the founder of Supersparks. And here is the story behind our company 👇
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Identifying the problem

The origin of Supersparks can be traced back to late 2022, when I came across an indiehacker on Twitter who was getting insane traffic on a directory site for beaches. I realized that I could actually build something quite similar for a different niche using Webflow and programmatic SEO. After many late nights, breweriesnearby.com was born:

The vision for this site was beyond just being a Yellow Pages style directory for craft beer breweries. I wanted to create a reviews-based community where beer lovers could connect and bond over the experiences at breweries, ensuring they actually engage and come back to our site.

So I got to work trying to implement a Goodreads style community reviews system. The problem was I couldn't find any third party solution that:

1. Allowed me to customize every element of my community / reviews experience in Webflow to match the design of the rest of my site
2. Could integrate with membership tools like Memberstack or Outseta, to display logged in members' profile details with their content
3. Wouldn't require to spend days coding or piecing together nocode tools with Zapier or Make

I ended up spending an entire weekend building a half-baked and guest only reviews system using Airtable and Make, which required me to embed slow and ugly Airtable forms, ate up CMS items (super precious on directories), and couldn't integrate with Memberstack or Outseta.

I thought to myself: "There has to be a better way" 🤔. And that's how Supersparks was born.

Building The MVP

A few months later after I got to work building Supersparks. I was lucky enough to bring onboard a talented engineer, Edilson Gudo, who has been my partner in crime since 2023.

The Launch 🚀

We initially launched Supersparks as Webflow's first commenting system in June of 2023 to a great response.

Since reviews are pretty much comments with stars, we eventually expanded to offering a reviews app a few months later. After launching reviews, I had the opportunity to add my app to breweriesnearby.com, effectively solving my own problem - one of the greatest feelings in the world!

Community Platform Pivot

Since launching we've had the opportunity to learn from the Webflow community the different community use cases for our tool. Some were unsurprising - for example, blog comments and directory items reviews.

However, one use case really stood out. We realized a few customers were creating 'forums' where the site owners would create the forum discussions / posts directly from the CMS and were leveraging our commenting app to allow users to respond to these discussions. Once again, we said: "There has to be a better way" 🤔.

After researching on the Webflow forum and speaking to customers, we realized: 1) there was a long-standing need for building forums using Webflow. So we expanded our vision to be 'THE Community Platform for Webflow'.

This was no doubt ambitious. I truly underestimated how many moving parts and features are required to build a community platform. After a month of deep work, we built our community posting feature to enable users to create new pages of forum posts / discussions via the Webflow CMS with rich text.

A few months after launching, we launched the first forum template ever for Webflow to help speed up the process of building a new community website.

And we have been plugging away ever since. We recently added key features for increasing community engagement, including reply notifications and upvoting.

As a business, the support of the Webflow community has helped us grow every month! Also, through our partnerships with Memberstack and Outseta, our tool has helped power a wide range of community projects, including:

Thanks for reading if you've made it this far! If you ever want to chat about your upcoming community project, do not hesitate to send me an email at ian@supersparks.io .

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