I really love Luma. It fits so well into my internal narrative about how to build a business/audience/community.
Twitter is all fun and games but if you want to build something more sustainable (a community or even a business) building an email list is the way to go. Substack rode that wave for quite some time now and yeah, there's not much else to say. Email is king.
Again, if you want to build up something as a sustainable part of your live a good way to support that is to figure out a way to make money from it. Luma lets you sell event tickets from the start and supports flexible prices (i.e. suggested/minimum). The integration with Stripe is so well done, it took me like 10 minutes max.
Besides the above it supports a bunch more functionality that just makes it a "great first website" type thing. You can publish updates, add links to other websites (a la linktree), you get some basic analytics about how many people visit and subscribe to updates.
The visual design just feels great and you can tell they want it to be fun to use.
Right now the whole product is really built around running events but I wonder if that's their "end goal". There's a store that you can set up. The only thing you can sell is credit packs which is basically discounted event tickets. That makes sense in their event-focused model but it's not far off to just turn this into a basic store for digital goods a la Gumroad as well.
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All these things in such a tight, easy to use package. You start with the email list, you run some free events and if there's more interest it's trivial to involve money. Their pricing makes so much sense too, free with 5% platform fee and some limits or $39 with no platform fee. It all kind of adds up for me 😅