What You'll Need to Do to Create and Launch Your Space

With Commonspace, you can build a community site for yourself, your business, a group, or anything else you like. A Space is your community home on the platform — similar to an ecommerce website, except instead of selling products, you're offering Memberships. You also have an Updates area for publishing content and a Members area to manage your community. You can customize all of these and enable additional features to fit how you want to run things.

Before you dive in, here's a complete picture of what creating and launching your Space involves — from the initial setup steps to going live. You don't have to do it all in one sitting: you can stop at any point and pick up right where you left off whenever you're ready. Your Space won't go live until you've completed the full process, so take it at your own pace. Whether you're ready to start now or just want to know what to expect, this article walks you through every step.

The creation process guides you through the following steps to build your Space:

Set up the core identity of your Space: your profile image, display name, username, and a short description. You'll also add your website and social media links, and select your country — which sets your Space's currency and payment setup. Note that your country selection cannot be changed after you launch.

Customize how your Space looks to visitors. The Welcome Section — your homepage header — is required, and includes a title, welcome message, and an image or video. You can also set up an optional Links Section to feature external links, such as your social profiles or other destinations relevant to your community.

Create at least one Membership — free, one-time, or recurring subscription — that lets people sign up and join your Space. You'll set the name, description, pricing, availability, and who can see it. You can offer multiple Memberships to serve different segments of your community, and you can add more at any time.

You'll also have the opportunity to enable Community Channels — a discussion feature that lets Members post and chat with each other, organized into topic channels, similar to a Facebook Group. You can set this up at this stage or come back to it later from your dashboard.

At this point you'll also have the opportunity to upgrade to a Pro Space. Your Space launches as a Basic Space by default — free to start, on a Commonspace-branded URL. Upgrading to Pro gives you your own custom domain, custom branding, advanced layouts, and lower sales rates. You can upgrade now or come back to it at any time from your dashboard.

Once your Space is built, you can preview it before moving into the launch steps. Your Space is a site for content, commerce, and community — and before it can go live, there are a few required steps to comply with privacy and payment regulations. When you've completed them, you'll manually launch your Space — nothing goes live automatically. You stay in control of when your Space becomes available to the public.

Provide the legal and contact information for the person or business responsible for your Space — including your legal name, address, and a few business classification fields. This information is kept private and used only by Commonspace to comply with privacy laws and provide services.

Set up the pages that help visitors and Members understand your Space and how it operates: About, FAQ, Support, Community Guidelines, Terms of Service, and Privacy Policy. These pages give your community the information they need to engage with confidence, and they protect you as a Space Owner. You can keep them simple to start and update them at any time.

Connect a payout method by verifying your bank account with Stripe, so you can accept credit card payments and receive payouts from sales of Memberships and Items. If you're not ready to complete this step yet, you can get a preview link that lets you share a fully functioning version of your Space — content will work, but transactions won't be active until your payout method is verified and your Space is launched.

Preview your Space one last time, then click the launch button when you're ready. Your Space goes live only when you choose to launch it.