About
Stephen Maddison is a community automation specialist and the founder of Automate Community. He gives busy community builders time and sanity back by optimising their community workflows and automating their processes.
Every community has its distinct rhythm, and Stephen always builds with the member journey in mind. His approach is to craft tailored solutions that compliment both your admin needs and the overall member experience, ensuring they align seamlessly with your community vision and set up. Should you run into any hiccups down the line, he's always ready to assist.
Services offered
Service packages
The Community Roadmap Project Sprint is a DWY approach to tackling large projects - covering areas like setting up your community, planning and implementing automations and making sure everything works from both an admin and a member perspective.
The Project Sprint is delivered as a recurring weekly session, including a 1 hour call & two hours of hands-on implementation based on the call work.
In the first session, we do a deep dive on your current community or vision to plan out which foundations and automations we'll likely need, in order to create an overall roadmap plan. In the following sessions, we tackle a piece of the roadmap at a time (like onboarding, offboarding etc) through a cycle of planning, implementation and testing.
This sprint approach is both highly tailored to your community operational goals, as well as being very adaptable to potential changes or barriers along the way.
You see results faster, there is no big upfront investment and we work closely together to ensure your community vision is delivered correctly.
On-going support is also available for clients once a project has been delivered.
Who I work with
Stephen can work with any Circle community and utilise the existing tool stack that the community relies on.
Typically, his clients are 5-6 figure creator-orientated community businesses. However he’s worked with a large variety of communities at different stages and with very different business models.
It’s always recommended that the community business already has an established audience, since it can be hard to see the full benefit of automations without a regular flow of members and activity.
Team and Experience
These services involve working directly with Stephen. Stephen has been creatively designing and implementing automated community solutions for over 7 years, across a huge variety of Circle communities.
From onboarding, offboarding, matchmaking, milestones, gamification, feedback loops and more, Stephen has customised and built a vast array of automated systems for Circle communities.
As a recognised Circle Partner and Contributor, Stephen is always working on new and exciting ideas on how to bring more capabilities to the Circle platform, as well as create tools to support community founders in the running of their business.
Case Studies
Mic Drop Case Study: Effortlessly Onboarding 50-Member Cohorts
Livvy Newton had a very irregular cohort style community that regularly required a heavy amount of manual work every time they wanted to bring in a new wave of members.
With my support, we implemented:
- An automated CRM that could handle matching waiting members to upcoming cohorts, opening access when the cohort day arrived and assigning relevant member access
- Scheduled check in & feedback loops at key member moments
- Automatic gamified badges for event activity and membership activity
TEDx & Keynote Mentorship Case Study: Seamlessly Tracking Member Progress
Cesar Cervantes came to me with a community that needed a lot of optimisation to reduce the daily admin work and accurately capture member progress.
With my support, we implemented:
- An automated CRM system to track member progress
- Workflows to send out time sensitive communications and resources
- Automated offboarding flows to downgrade members when access expires, based on complex logic situations
Bible Study Co Case Study: Boosting Engagement Through Gamification
Diana Kokku reached out with a desire to increase her community engagement, and streamline the overall operations.
With my support, we implemented:
- Milestone systems to track and reward member engagement with Zoom events, reading commitments and post activity
- Automated check ins & feedback loops to re-engage inactive members
- Onboarding and offboarding flows to smoothly move members through the community
Conscious Mommy Case Study: Automating Tiered Membership & Milestones
Bryana Kappadakunnel was migrating from Thinkific to Circle and needed help managing a complex transition involving courses, memberships, and automations.
With my support, we implemented:
- A migration system to move Thinkific users into Circle with correct access
- An onboarding flow for three different member types: subscribers, course-only members, and trials
- Automated offboarding flows for expired subscriptions and one-year course access
- A reward system assigning tags based on community engagement (comments and posts)
- A zap to auto-generate Zoom links for new Circle events
Testimonials
Pedro Hernandes
“Stephen is an absolute wizard with Zapier, Make, and Circle. He has a natural talent for understanding Circle’s nuances and integrating them seamlessly with other platforms. His ability to simplify complex workflows is a game-changer. He’s our go-to for automation — we trust his advice completely. Plus, he’s collaborative, approachable, and truly cares about helping others succeed. A real asset to our community! ❤️”
Tom Ross
I'm incredibly selective with who I recommend to my network and who I vouch for, but honestly, working with Stephen has been one of the most profound things for my business and my community.
Kristina Leroux
“10/10 would recommend! Stephen was a game-changer for our organisation. He streamlined our complex systems, saving us countless hours we didn’t even realise we were wasting. He’s not only technically brilliant but also patient, thoughtful, and empowering — he made sure we understood how to manage things ourselves. Worth every penny!”
Livvy Merry
“Working with Stephen has been a game-changer! I used to struggle with onboarding, but now we handle 50-member intakes with ease and even have daily tasks automated I didn’t think were possible. I threw every kind of scenario at him, and he handled it all with skill and patience. I’m way more in control now, and I couldn’t recommend him more — automations will truly change your life!”
Peter Giza
“Stephen has been absolutely instrumental in getting our learning management software moved over to Circle. We were launching a branded app while bringing over 4,000 plus people, and we just would not have been able to get to where we got to as quickly and as efficiently without Stephen. He's super confident, knows how to use Zapier plus Circle workflows and just makes everything all work seamlessly together. Cannot recommend him highly enough. It's really hard to find somebody who not only understands the vision of how the community needs to function, but who is also able to automate and make it the most effective as possible. If you need a Circle expert man, don't go anywhere else. Seriously, it's like Steve or bust.”