I knew I had the interested customers but then came the other side of the equation: How do you get someone from your website, to a checkout screen, collect their payment and authenticate it, send them into a private Discord server, and automatically apply the correct permissions based on the product they purchased, all while giving them self-service capabilities so they can manage their own payments, update payment info, upgrade to higher tiered products, and ultimately cancel on their own without ever once involving the server owner?

But before we get into that, let’s talk a bit about Discord and what it is. If you’re already are familiar and know what it is, then feel free to skip down to this next section: Problems With Discords Platform

What is Discord?

Discord is a social media platform that is designed for online communities to communicate via voice, video, and text. It was originally created for gamers to chat and connect while playing games, but it has since expanded to include a wide range of communities with different interests.

Discord offers a variety of features including voice and video chat, text messaging, file sharing, screen sharing, and more. It also allows users to create and join servers, which are essentially online communities where people can gather to discuss a specific topic or interest.

Within a server, you can make it either public or private (invite-only) and the general structure of a server contains “Categories” and “Channels.” Each “Category” helps you group “Channels” together to better organize your conversations and you can make “Channels” read-only as well (e.g. great for preserving a set list of topics/resources in a channel and then locking it to read-only so no one else can message within that channel).

Users can customize their profiles, create and join groups or channels, and add friends. Discord also offers integrations with other platforms, such as Twitch and YouTube, to allow for easy sharing of content and collaboration.

Overall, Discord is a popular platform for people to connect and socialize with others who share similar interests or hobbies.

Problems With Discords Platform

Though Discord is a great platform for engagement, there are several drawbacks to its native platform that makes it difficult to create and run a business through one.

No Customer Data

Not having the correct customer data capture can create several problems for businesses including:

1. Inaccurate customer information: Without the correct data, businesses may have incorrect or incomplete customer information, which can lead to inaccurate insights and decision-making.
2. Poor customer experience: If businesses do not have the correct customer data, they may not be able to provide personalized and targeted customer experiences. This can result in frustrated and dissatisfied customers who may take their business elsewhere.
3. Wasted marketing efforts: Without accurate data, businesses may struggle to effectively target their marketing campaigns, resulting in wasted time, resources, and budget.
4. Missed opportunities: If businesses do not have the correct customer data, they may miss out on opportunities to engage with customers and create valuable relationships.

Natively inside of Discord, you can only see a persons Discord Display Name, Discord ID, Profile Picture, and Roles. Beyond that, you can’t see email address or any other important customer identifiers which makes it near impossible to personalize or segment your audience to properly market to them. You also cannot easily export all of your members from your server in to a spreadsheet thus creating further complexities around tracking customer history.

Lastly, through the use of “Roles” in Discord, you can easily create personalization and eventually segmentation for your audience though again, the problem remains that there is not an easy way for Discord server owners to extract all of this data (without prior programming/technical knowledge).