From Group Chat to Platform: Digitising a Community
By Hasbiarahman Efendi · 12 November 2026 · 2 min read
Digital transformation for a community means giving each recurring need its own place, instead of asking one group chat to do every job at once.
Jumat Manjat is a climbing community that meets every Friday night at Plaza Festival Kuningan in Jakarta. It is open to all levels, and 1,747 climbers have joined. I designed and built its website, jumatmanjat.com, myself. This article explains what the site does, why each part exists, and how you can apply the same thinking to your own community.
The jobs a community has to do
A group chat is where most communities start, and for good reason. It is free and everyone already has it. The limit shows as the group grows. A single stream of messages has to carry announcements, coordination, conversation, memories and sales, and each one buries the others.
Before building anything, I find it useful to list the jobs separately:
The Jumat Manjat site gives each of these jobs a feature.
What the site does
A climbing queue
At a shared climbing session, turns have to be managed. The site has a climbing queue. A queue that everyone can see reduces confusion: nobody has to ask whose turn it is, nobody has to keep the order in their head, and a newcomer can tell how things work without knowing anyone. For a community that is open to all levels, that last point matters. The first visit should not depend on already having friends in the group.
Community chat
The site has its own community chat. Conversation is the heart of a community, so it belongs inside the platform, next to the activity it is about, and not in a separate app where it competes with everything else on a person's phone.
Stories and articles
A chat forgets. What was shared last month is practically gone. Stories and articles give the community a memory: something a new member can read to understand what the group is about, and something a long-time member can point to.
A merch shop
Merchandise lets members carry the community's identity outside the Friday session. Putting the shop on the same site keeps ordering in one place, with no need to track orders across private messages.
Member login
Login ties the rest together. It turns a visitor into a member, and it means the queue, the chat and the shop all know who the person is.
You can see the project in my work section.
Design decisions behind it
I learned the value of structure in a very different setting, managing creator communities for a brand. Keeping groups small enough to feel like a group, and giving them a consistent experience, was the foundation everything else was built on. I wrote about that in the community engagement strategy behind our GMV growth. A hobby community is not a creator program, but the principle carries over: people stay active where they feel part of something organised.