Creating your community on beehiiv

Creating your community takes just a few minutes. A short setup wizard walks you through naming your community, choosing who can access it, and picking which features to turn on, then builds your first channels and adds your team as the first members. This guide walks through each step of the wizard.

• Community is available on all paid plans. 
• You can create one community per publication.
• To offer paid access, you need Stripe connected to your publication and at least one paid subscription tier. You can set up paid tiers under Subscriptions.

1. From the left panel, open Community. Then, select Create your community.
   
   
   

The wizard opens with a progress bar. You can move back to any completed step, and your choices are saved as you go.

• Community name (required). This name is displayed in your community. 

  Tech Note: Your community name can be up to 100 characters.
• Community description (optional). A brief description of your community.
• Community URL. Where your community will be accessible.

Select Next to continue on to step 2. 

This step lets you choose whether your community is free to join or locked behind a paywall.

• Free for all:  Anyone you invite can join at no cost.
• Pay to join: Access is locked behind a paywall. Members must be subscribed to one of the selected tiers to join.
• Free with paid channels: Free to join, with specific channels gated to paid tiers. Great for giving everyone a taste while reserving premium channels for paying members.
• Pay to join + upgrade for more: The whole community is behind a paywall, and certain channels require a higher tier for access.

Select Next to continue.

Choose what to turn on for your community. You can change all of these later in Settings.

• Sync newsletter posts (recommended):  When you send a post from your newsletter, the post is also published to your community. This option is enabled by default.

• Sync podcast episodes: When you publish a new podcast episode, the episode is also shared to your community.

  Tech Note: The Sync podcast episodes∫ option will only be shown if you have set up a podcast in your publication.
• Backfill historical posts: Sync all of your past newsletter posts into your community, not just future ones. This option is turned off by default.
• Enable mobile app: Let members install your community as an app and receive push notifications. This option is turned on by default.
• Direct messages: Allow members to send each other direct messages from inside the community. This option is turned on by default. 

Select Next to continue on to designing your community. 

Set your community's colors: background color, primary color, and the text colors that appear on each. A live preview shows how your choices look. For the full breakdown of theming, see Customizing your community's design.

Select Create community to finalize your set up. 

Congratulations, you created your community! 

beehiiv sets up your community:

• Your community is created with the name, access, and design you chose.
• A default General channel is created. If you turned on post syncing, a Newsletters channel is also created, and your synced posts are published there.
• Your team is added as the community's first members, with you as an admin.
• If you chose to backfill historical posts, your past newsletter posts are imported in the background (this can take a little while for large archives).

• Invite your subscribers so you don't launch to an empty room. See How to invite your subscribers to your community.
• Add more channels to organize the conversation. See Creating and managing channels.
• Write your first post to get things started. See Creating, pinning, and managing posts.