The Futur

Who The Futur is and how our partnership started

The Futur is the design and business education brand founded by Chris Do. Its courses, coaching and resources help creatives and agencies master both the craft and the business side of creative work. It was also our very first client. The Futur's team had designed and built their first Webflow site in-house. When we took over the site in 2021, our first job was updating the entire site so it could scale and stay compliant. From there we built their e-commerce platform on Webflow. Along the way, the partnership grew into running the web product side with their team, led on their end by COO Ben Burns. So when The Futur decided to change how it sold its knowledge, Webflow was already the foundation and Fri3nds was already in the room.

• 2021: the start of our partnership, and Fri3nds' first client ever
• 1 full site update for scale and compliance, then 1 e-commerce platform, before the Member's Area

The challenge: turning one-off products into a paid membership

The Futur's audience was changing. One-off digital products were no longer pulling the engagement they used to, and the energy was moving toward memberships with ongoing value and a community to belong to. So The Futur made the call to pivot to a paid subscription: people register, choose a free or paid plan, and get the content and benefits that come with it. The requirements stacked up fast. Secure payments and member data. Access to Circle, the community The Futur already ran. Videos, filters, search and favorites. And a marketing team that needed to know what every member was doing. All of it had to work on Webflow, which does not do most of that out of the box.

How we built a paid Member's Area on Webflow

We started from what already worked. The site we had made scalable and the store we had built were on Webflow and payments already ran through Stripe, so we picked tools that fit that world instead of fighting it. A content strategy session aligned everyone on what the Member's Area had to hold, then we wireframed the key sections and worked alongside a copywriter to write in The Futur's voice. Outseta handled registration, login and plans on top of Stripe. In the Webflow CMS we built content collections mapped to each subscription plan, so the right members saw the right content. Zapier webhooks sent every sign-up to Drip, Pipedrive and Circle, so a new member got everything promised right away, with no one on The Futur's team stepping in by hand. Finsweet filters, Algolia search that understands related terms, and a favorites feature made the right video easy to find.

How we brought DoBot into the member experience

The Futur also wanted members to have an AI assistant inspired by Chris Do. The Futur engaged an external provider to build it, and our job was to make it feel native to the Member's Area. We coordinated timelines with that team, embedded DoBot in the site and built the backend that saved each member's conversation history, so people could pick up where they left off. When the next version of DoBot came around, we prepared a Webflow video database export for it. It is the kind of work that lives past a site's native limits, and exactly where The Futur needed a partner who knew both the site and the stack.

What changed for The Futur's team

The Futur ended up with a membership business that ran itself at the moment of purchase. Plans, payments, community access and marketing data connected without manual work, and every member's interests landed in the tools the marketing team already used, ready for targeted emails and for pointing people toward courses, mentorships and events. It did not stop at launch. We kept a regular web product sync with Ben and the team, and each cycle brought the next slice: a new feature, a fix, a better way to find content.

What our first client taught us

Every Fri3nds story starts here. Pushing their site beyond what Webflow does out of the box, and staying close to their team for years while we did it, set the standard for how we have worked with every client since.

"Working with Fri3nds has made everything easier on our team here at The Futur. They not only simplified our existing website build, but they helped us push the site beyond Webflow's native capabilities. I'm a big fan of no-code, but sometimes, you need experts like Fri3nds to bring the magic of engineering to bear. Together, we've even created a low-code membership app and have been expanding features and capabilities each month. Their team is responsive, proactive, and, as their name would suggest, friendly. Highly recommend."
Ben Burns, COO, The Futur

Credits

• Client: The Futur. Ben Burns (COO)
• DoBot AI assistant: built by an external provider engaged by The Futur; embedded and connected by Fri3nds
• Copywriting: a copywriter working alongside Fri3nds
• Original Webflow site: The Futur's in-house team
• Full site update for scale and compliance, e-commerce platform, membership build and integrations: Fri3nds
• Services: Webflow development, Webflow e-commerce, membership build, integrations (Outseta, Stripe, Zapier, Drip, Pipedrive, Circle, Algolia)