Setting up a new club: the onboarding checklist

The first time you create a club, you land on a short guided setup — a checklist that walks through the handful of things worth deciding before you tell people about your new site. It’s only ever shown to the club’s owner or an admin; members never see it.

It’s entirely optional scaffolding, not a gate — every screen in it is a shortcut to a real page you could also reach directly from the admin console (Settings, Plans, Members, and so on). Nothing in the wizard does anything a normal admin action doesn’t already do.

The 10 steps

1. Welcome & club basics — confirm the name, add a tagline and contact email.
2. Location & public info — address, meeting times, directions, a short About. All optional.
3. Branding — a theme, colors, and an optional logo.
4. Membership plans — create at least one, or explicitly say the club has none.
5. Getting paid — Stripe (if available), Venmo/Cash App, or explicitly offline-only.
6. Add your roster — add members by hand, or just share the Join link.
7. Competition classes — pick from common suggestions or add your own.
8. First event — create a shoot or league, or skip it for later.
9. Communications — add a contact or draft a welcome message. Nothing sends automatically.
10. Review & launch — a summary of what’s done, skipped, or still open, and a Finish setup button.

Required versus optional

Welcome, Plans, Getting paid, and Review are the only steps that need an explicit answer — even if that answer is “no plans” or “offline payments only.” Everything else (location, branding, roster, classes, first event, communications) is genuinely optional: click Skip for now and move on, nothing is lost or locked.

A step is marked done the moment the real thing it’s asking for exists — create a plan from the Plans page on your own, outside the wizard entirely, and the checklist notices and marks that step complete the next time you look at it. The checklist always reflects your club’s actual state, not just what you clicked inside the wizard.

Leaving, resuming, and revisiting

You can stop at any point — close the tab, sign out, come back tomorrow on a different device. Your place is saved on the club, not your browser, so it’s there when you return. Until you click Finish setup on the last screen, the admin Overview page shows a small “Finish setting up your club” reminder with a one-click Resume setup button; dismiss it any time without losing your progress.

Finishing doesn’t publish anything hidden, send any message, connect any account, or charge anyone — it’s purely a “done for now” marker. Once finished, the wizard won’t pop back up on its own, but it’s never gone: a permanent Setup checklist link stays on the Overview page for whenever you want to go back and change something.

See also: Getting started as a club admin for the full permissions picture, Setting up membership plans and dues for how calendar-year, rolling, and custom plans work, and Getting paid for the Stripe/Venmo/Cash App details.