A little background — We’re a startup that is a dating coach platform. We connect people who want a dating coach with dating coaches. This is a subscription-based service. I’ve got the subscription part working. I’ve figured out how to have the subscription live in the user account and only show with an active subscription — it is critical to make sure people don’t schedule coaches without an active subscription.
Goal — Now we want to run promotions to get people into the service. We would like to let people schedule 1 consultation with a dating coach to get a feel for the service. After that, they’d need to signup for an active subscription. I’m thinking we need to create a workflow that basically goes from ad→landing page→Signup→book consultation. (I’ve attached a more detailed view).
Issues — I’m struggling to figure out how to create this “1 time per account” setup. My first thought was to make a free product that they could “buy,” and then they go to the consultation page, but I can’t figure out how to make it so they can only use the consultation once.
Has anyone encountered this before? How did you think about solving the problem? What tools did you need to bolt on to webflow to make it work? Can you do it natively with webflow/cms/ecomm?
I haven’t read through the design details deeply, but I think I got the key points- users create a free Webflow User account, and they get one free consultation. They’re then encouraged to switch to a paid account, and can continue bookings ( paid but discounted? ).
The tradeoff for using low-cost off-the shelf solutions is that the integration points aren’t particularly securable or robust. Anyone with the right knowledge and incentive can hack them and your “security” falls apart. That said…
A hack solution is,
Store the “claimed free session?” boolean as a custom user field, it will default to false on account creation
Utilize that ** and custom code to present your “free session” button, and to take the user to a gated page, which has a special calendly booking cal embedded. The link itself is not visible, but can be obtained in the source code, and there’s really nothing to prevent someone from doing multiple bookings all at once. Hopefully you can pass a custom field in, containing your user id.
Have a back end automation that triggers off of new Calendly bookings, looks for that specific booking, grabs the user id, and then changes their “claimed free session?” var to true.
Quite hacky, and you need some things to make this work, like SA5 User Info and some custom code.
BETTER APPROACHES
Memberstack gives much better access to user data and supports read-write client-side.
Calendly.com is good, but there are others… Cal.com, Cozycal.com, etc. If you can find one you like that supports 100% discount codes and the ability to create them via API, you can build a less-exposed setup.
Creating a new account triggers an automation, which creates a coupon code on your specific booking type, and adds it as custom data to the Webflow user account.
You display that to the user, they can claim their free session and enter that code to make it free. This way, if the booking link is exposed, no real issue, they need a valid code too.
On booking, delete the coupon code from the user’s account, and delete the code in the booking system so it cannot be reused ( or make it single-use if that’s an option ).
You’d probably still use SA5 just to determine whether or not to display the “free session” button in the user’s account up until they book that session. Later it changes to “book your next session” or something.
Thank you so much! I really appreciate the help. I think Memberstack is probably the way we’ll need to go given our level of coding experience.
@memetican Silly followup, would Memberstack be in addition to Foxycart? I’m not sure I understand how to get the two to work together. The reason I like Foxycart is it shows members their order/subscription history.
I’d have to do some analysis work to recommend a specific approach.
If you’re using Foxy, that’s a separate service which has a separate fee. It does have some form of membership / login services, I have no idea what they’re capable of ( e.g. content gating )
Memberstack is excellent, you’ll likely still need some programming work any way you go to get all of these pieces integrated.
You might look into Wized instead, which is promoted as a nocode framework for Webflow, and it has both authentication and payment services that you can use and integrate.
You’ll likely need to invest some hours trying the different systems and figure out what works for your needs.
@Hello_from_Thread
Josh with Foxy here. We provide our own content gating functionality. Memberstack is not needed since we handle memberships/gating natively.
Happy to chat through your specific needs. Please don’t hesitate to reach out: hello@foxy.io
