Google Forms Was Killing My Session Attendance
Google Form registrations, manual WhatsApp blasts, a blocked number, and joining links in spam folders. So I built the whole flow into my website. First session: 74% of registrants actually showed up.
Stack
The problem
Google Form for registrations. Export the sheet. Manually send everyone the joining link on WhatsApp before the session starts.
Send the same link to 50 people in quick succession and WhatsApp flags your number for spam. My personal number got blocked more than once doing this. That was fun to explain.
I tried showing a WhatsApp group join link on the confirmation page so they'd add themselves. But anyone who filled the form could enter the group, there was no real control over it, and it looked cheap for something I was putting my name on.
Then I tried email confirmations. They went to promotions, which in Qatar might as well be the trash. The community audience here lives on WhatsApp. People who genuinely wanted to attend were missing the link because it sat in a tab they never open.
What I built
I built the whole session flow into my own website. Each session gets a registration page with a title, description, date, seat count, and a progress bar that fills as spots go. When seats run out, it flips to a waitlist automatically.
When someone registers, one WhatsApp message goes out from my number through the API. One message per registration, not a bulk blast. WhatsApp doesn't flag it because it's not a broadcast.
Reminders go out automatically, 24 hours before and again 1 hour before. Each person gets their own tracked join link, so I can see who clicked and when, not just who signed up. After the session ends, a feedback request goes out on WhatsApp too.
Admin view of the first session: registrations, attendance, and page analytics
First session
The first session through the system was on non-coding AI use cases for Claude. 244 people registered.
10 minutes before start, the join link went out. 183 people clicked it. That's 74%.
Registrations are easy to get. People sign up and forget. The number I actually care about is how many clicked the join link right before start, because that's who showed up. Before this system I had no way to track that. Based on how many faces actually appeared in calls before, the old number was a lot lower.