Rachel Starr,
Community By Design Co.
Language
English
Response Time
24 Hours
About
Rachel is the founder of Community By Design Co., a Circle build and strategy agency for creators and companies who show up with an idea nobody has been willing to build for them. She is a Circle Certified Partner and Circle Expert, and she leads a full team of strategists, builders, and community managers, so an engagement runs from first idea through launch and beyond without a handoff to anyone else. You bring the vision. Her team makes it happen.
Community By Design Co. specializes in outside the box builds, the ones other partners call impossible. Working through the Community By Design Blueprint, a six stage system spanning Discover, Design, Build, Launch, Grow, and Thrive, Rachel and her team have consolidated scattered content libraries and Facebook groups into single Circle homes, migrated large course catalogs, designed custom daily rituals and in person event hubs, and shipped branded apps to the App Store. Rachel also runs her own Circle Plus community with a branded app, which means every recommendation she makes has already been tested inside a community she owns.
Alongside the build work, Rachel provides ongoing strategic advisory to founders and leadership teams, and partners regularly with Circle advisor Matthew Gartland on larger engagements where executive strategy and community architecture need to move together.
Services offered
Service packages
Every engagement is custom. Community By Design Co. does not sell a fixed package, because the right scope depends on where a company is in its community lifecycle. What stays consistent is the framework.
All work runs through the Community By Design Blueprint, a six stage system:
Discover. Audience research, business goals, and the strategic case for community.
Design. Offer, tiers, pricing, spaces, member journey, and content architecture.
Build. Full Circle build or migration, including courses, paywalls, automations, custom design, branding, and app setup.
Launch. Launch plan, lifecycle email, onboarding sequences, and opening events.
Grow. Engagement systems, retention, reporting, and team enablement.
Thrive. A community that sustains itself, with member led culture, mature leadership, and room to keep evolving.
Engagements typically run as a defined build project, an ongoing strategic partnership, or a combination of the two. Scope, timeline, and team involvement are shaped around the company’s vision and internal capacity.
Community By Design Co. takes on a limited number of active engagements at a time in order to protect depth of work. To inquire about availability and scope, contact Rachel directly.
Who I work with
Community By Design Co. partners with community builders who want to create outside the box experiences, the founders who have a specific vision in their head and have been told it cannot be built, or worse, have been handed a watered down version of it.
That includes creators and authors turning an audience into a membership, established businesses migrating an existing community onto Circle, and companies building community as the delivery layer for their product. What connects them is ambition. They are not looking for a template. They are looking for someone who can see the thing they are describing and then actually build it.
Rachel and her team advise and equip in the following areas:
- Community strategy: positioning, offer architecture, tier design, and the member journey end to end
- Circle builds and migrations: full builds from scratch, platform migrations, Circle Plus, and branded app launches
- Custom builds that go beyond Circle's defaults, including daily rituals, journaling experiences, and hubs for in person events living inside the community app
- Course and content architecture, including large library migrations
- Onboarding, lifecycle email, and retention systems that reduce churn without adding founder hours
- Engagement design: events, challenges, rituals, and moderation systems that create participation by design
- Virtual summits and large scale live experiences hosted on Circle
- Team and operations design: roles, SOPs, and handoff so the community runs without the founder in every thread
- AI and automation inside Circle, including Circle AI and MCP workflows
Team and Experience
Rachel Starr, Founder and Lead Community Strategist
Circle Certified Partner and Expert. Owner of a Circle Plus community with a branded app. Leads strategy, architecture, and design on every engagement.
Molli Gorell, Director of Operations
Runs project delivery, systems, and implementation across client engagements.
Maggie Klaassens, Community Build Specialist
Builds client spaces, courses, paywalls, and deliverables inside Circle.
Jason Hershkowitz, Head of Community Management
Leads ongoing community management, programming, and member experience for clients in growth mode.
Tiffany Rivera, Community Engagement Specialist
Drives day to day engagement, member touchpoints, and participation systems.
Rachel has spent 18+ years self employed and has produced 12+ virtual summits, including a 2,000 person event run entirely on Circle that Circle published as a customer case study. She hosts the Community at Heart podcast and the Your Community Strategist YouTube channel, one of the largest independent libraries of Circle strategy content anywhere.
Case Studies
The Candida Fix, with Chloe Williams, RHN
A thriving WhatsApp group that had outgrown itself, rebuilt as a fully custom Circle community with its own branded app.
Cathy Heller
A duct taped setup with the content library in one place, the audience in a Facebook group, and assets scattered everywhere, consolidated into one Circle home. We brought it all in house, then built a custom daily journaling experience that gives members a reason to open the app every single day. Launched with a branded app.
Farmluxe, with Misha Gillingham
A large library of videos, courses, and documents migrated into a full Circle platform build. Because Farmluxe also hosts in person retreats, we built custom hubs so their IRL events live inside the app alongside the online experience. Launched with a branded app.
Testimonials
Misha Gillingham
I had a pretty big, complex project when I approached Community By Design: migrating a large library of videos, courses, and documents to Circle, plus building out a full platform with lots of moving parts. Rachel and her team made this giant project feel smooth and totally manageable. Communication was quick and clear, their organizational systems kept everything on track, and they brought so much knowledge to the table. My teams and I learned a ton from working with them. I would highly recommend them to anyone looking for a thoughtful, skilled, and reliable team.
Chloe Williams, RHN
My community had completely outgrown the WhatsApp group it was living in. The problem was that I didn’t know how to turn my vision into reality. I tried explaining my idea to a handful of people in the online space and got blank stares or watered down versions of what I actually wanted.
Then I met Rachel. Within 15 minutes of our first conversation I knew there was nobody else on this planet who could build what I had in my head. What she went on to create was the most beautiful community space I could have ever imagined. Honestly, it is so much better than what was in my head. She brought my vision to life with a level of taste, intention, and care that I have never experienced from anyone I have hired before.
Rachel sees your vision and she runs with it. No hand holding, no micromanaging, no endless check ins. She quite literally just gets it. If you have the chance to work with her, take it. You will not find anyone else like her.