How does Levellr work?

If you’re a creator with a buzzing community, you might have found yourself wondering how to talk to your fans in a more direct way.

Perhaps you’ve even wondered how to get superfans to talk to each other - sharing their own hints, tips and insight into whatever passion you share. Whether you’re on TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube or iTunes, these platforms don’t make it easy for you to hold genuine conversations and for commenters to engage in a way that fosters respect and authenticity.

Rather than building our own messaging app (does anyone want to download yet another app?), we’ve built the tools to help you build a messaging community on whatever platform your fans are most comfortable with, including Telegram, Discord & Slack.

“But!” you may ask, “These services already exist! Why do I need Levellr to help me do this?!”

An excellent question. Levellr can help you with that, just like we help clients from Fall Out Boy to Starbucks asked the same thing, and we'll tell you what we told them.

The right tools for the job

Much like Mailchimp built the tools to help all of us make the most out of email, Levellr is doing the same for messaging. It may seem simple on the surface, but for those of you out there who want to build a professional community, just setting up a group on Telegram, Discord or Slack and unleashing it to the world brings some serious challenges.

For example, how do you actually get people into the messaging community in the first place? How can you work out who the people in your community are? How can you access key user & engagement data on your community? How do you monetise your community? How do you keep the space free of spam & trolls?

Levellr give you all the tools you need to build, manage and grow your community, whether it be free to access for your fans, members-only (e.g so only your existing subscribers can join - perfect for Patreon and Substack users), or paywalled, so fans can pay to access the groups - whether that’s a one-off or subscription payment.

(It’s worth mentioning that, of course, no fan will have access to your phone number when you create a group on Levellr. It’s not like having a friend on WhatsApp; more like running a community, with all the professional protection that should go with that.)

It couldn’t be simpler for you to set up.

1. Create a Levellr landing page

We’ve made it a piece of cake to create something super-slick with your own brand, images and language. Create your page for free. (Alternatively, you can also use our Levellr plug-in so you can build a landing page for your messaging community on your own website. Email us out to find out more.)

2. Tell your fans all about it

Whatever platform you hang out on, give your fans all the details as to what your messaging community is about and why they will benefit from joining it - whether that’s insights on who to pick in your fantasy football team, cryptocurrency hot tips or Great British Bake Off gossip.

We suggest including the link to your page in your bio, posting across all your socials regularly and tapping into your mailing list to drive regular traffic and conversions from your page.

For those of you out there who still feel uncomfortable about promoting your communities, as creators ourselves, we get it: self promotion can feel a bit weird sometimes. But that’s why we’ve built something that helps you add real value to your users. We love this article by creator Josh Spector, which might help you feel comfortable about the whole thing.

3. Your fans sign up

When your fan visits your Levellr page and enters their details, they will receive a link. They click, and are instantly whisked to their Telegram, Discord or Slack app, with the group right there waiting for them (or they’ll receive a prompt to download the app, if they haven’t already).

4. Your fans join the community and get chatting

Functionality within the app depends on the service, but let’s look at Telegram as an example. The overwhelming consensus from Levellr-using creators is “it just works”. Tweets embed natively without any annoying need to click out of the app. Videos post without any encoding issues, and besides media, you can send files like PDFs or documents (great if you’re running any kind of course). You can host video calls with an unlimited number of people, and you can do all this on any device - phone, tablet, laptop etc.

5. Get invaluable data and insights on your community

Not only are your fans now loving your messaging community (go you!), but you are getting invaluable data and insights on your community through our slick and easy-to-use dashboards:

Levellr is completely free to use for a messaging group of up to 500 members. And if that number makes you instantly think larger communities = more trolling, don’t worry. Levellr’s got that sorted. In just a few seconds, you can mute, block or remove any community member, with the minimum of drama or fuss.

Messaging groups are magical

You might be surprised at the power of a messaging group to super-charge your audience engagement. Imagine having a group of people literally at your fingertips who are willing to act as an on-call focus group, giving you unbeatable insights into what they like, don’t like and want to see more of. It’s a place where you can upsell other revenue streams, such as merchandise, and most of all, it’s somewhere you can chat about the passion that led you to create your channel in the first place.

Here are just a handful of ways Levellr can be used:

• A football podcast can schedule their fans to join the chat group at 6pm every Friday to talk about the weekend’s upcoming fixtures in real-time
• A real-estate expert Patreon or Substack creator can create a messaging community exclusively for their paying members to help drive new subscriptions & increase retention
• A personal development coach can leave community members a daily voice note, giving them a task to complete
• A personal finance guru can send community members a New Year budget planner worksheet as a Christmas gift
• A skincare influencer can set up a video call with as many members as want to join, taking them through their own daily regime and doing a live Q&A
• A fitness trainer can create a community of people all tackling Couch25K at the same time, for encouragement, motivation and tip-sharing
• A make-up brand can create a space to have direct engagement with their superfans, making fans feel even more special (whilst also giving the brand a group of customers to get real-time feedback, data and learnings from)
• A cryptocurrency expert can record short videos with their insight every time there’s significant market movement
• A chef can run a 6-week course for aspiring cooks that want not just the live classes, but on-going interaction with the chef throughout the week as they learn and grow their culinary skills!

The free membership promises to stay free forever, but what if you want to build a paid community, and monetise that chat?

Levellr is here for that. With out software, you can charge your community for access to your messaging group. The potential here is enormous. You can keep it simple, and charge members a one-off fee to access a general group. You could run a subscription model, and even offer different tiers, giving different levels of membership access to different messaging groups. You can create a one-off group for just a few weeks and charge for access, perhaps creating a course and then running the entire course through Levellr.

Perhaps you already have a number of paid subscribers via Patreon or an existing package you offer on Kickstarter? For you, Levellr could act as another thing that subscribers would receive as part of their existing membership, acting more as a retention tool than a standalone revenue stream.

Whether you sign up to a free or paid Levellr package, you can get insight into who makes up your top tier of fans, collecting valuable data in a way that just isn’t possible on most other platforms. A paid subscription also gives you access to invaluable usage data, so you can see how many people are converting from a free trial to a paid messaging subscription, who is most active and where and when people are chatting.

So that’s the lowdown on Levellr: a simple piece of messaging software that gives you access to your community on your terms. Sound good?

Your superfans are waiting. Contact Levellr today to find out how you can build a community which works for your brand.