Setting up your community is faster with Pulse. When you open Pulse for the first time, it will ask you a few questions about what you're building, who it's for, and how you make money today. From there, it creates a personalised setup plan and works through it with you — step by step.

Prefer to set up manually?

If you'd rather work through setup yourself, follow the checklist below. Each step links to a detailed guide.

1. Add your branding

~3–5 minutes

Upload your logo and a splash image, then pick your theme colours or select a template.

→ Customising your community theme

2. Set up payments

~5–10 minutes

Connect Stripe and create your first paid Offer. Communities that set up payments in the first 30 days are 50% more likely to reach $200 MRR.

→ Set up Heartbeat Payments 

→ Create your first Offer

3. Customise onboarding

~5–10 minutes

Add onboarding questions and decide what happens when a new member joins. This is how you collect member information and create a better first impression.

→ How to customise onboarding for new members

4. Invite your team and first members

~2–3 minutes

Create a Sign Up Link and send invitations — first to any moderators or beta testers, then to your broader member list once you're ready to launch.

→ How to invite users into your community 

→ How to create a Sign Up Link

5. Add a custom domain (optional)

~10 minutes

Put your community on your own domain. Members connect to your brand — not Heartbeat's.

→ How to set up a custom domain 

→ How to set up a custom subdomain

Want to see a real community first?

If you'd rather look at a finished community before building your own, there are two places to go.

→ Join The Hearth, Heartbeat’s own community, built on Heartbeat with thousands of community builders in it. You can look around the whole thing, including the "how i built this" channel where members break down how they set their own communities up.

→ Read the Success Stories for write-ups of real communities and how they were built.