Case Study - A Community-Driven Ecosystem for Business Acquisitions

Overview

Acquisition Network is a community-driven organization built around a single mission: helping businesses acquire other businesses. Their members are entrepreneurs, operators, and investors navigating the complex world of business acquisitions — sourcing deals, performing due diligence, sharing insights, and closing transactions.

Before coming to Kingdom Kode, Acquisition Network had no custom platform. They were patching together off-the-shelf tools — Slack, Circle, Discord, generic forum software — trying to find something that fit. Nothing did. The workflows around deal flow, member engagement, and community management were fragmented across platforms that were never designed for this use case.

They needed a platform that was theirs — purpose-built for how their community actually operates.

What we did

The Challenge: No Home Base

Acquisition Network's members were scattered. Conversations happened in one tool, deal flow in another, resources in a shared drive, and event coordination over email. There was no single source of truth, no engagement loop, and no way to monetize the community with a cohesive subscription model.

The client had tried multiple platforms and kept hitting the same wall: generic community tools do not understand business acquisition workflows. They needed features that simply did not exist in off-the-shelf products — deal rooms, acquisition-specific member profiles, tiered community access, and admin controls tailored to their operational model.

The brief was clear: build a community platform from scratch that unifies everything under one roof and generates predictable recurring revenue.

Mobile-First Hybrid Application

We built the application mobile-first — compiled natively for iOS and Android — with a web-accessible companion so members can engage from any device. The mobile experience is the primary surface. Business acquisitions move fast, and members need to respond to opportunities, engage in discussions, and manage their deal pipeline from wherever they are.

Key features of the community application:

• Member profiles — Acquisition-focused profiles where members showcase their portfolio, investment criteria, deal history, and areas of expertise. Not a generic social profile — a professional identity built for deal-making.
• Community feed — A real-time feed for sharing insights, asking questions, posting deal opportunities, and engaging with other members. Threaded discussions keep conversations organized.
• Deal rooms — Private, invite-only spaces where members can collaborate on specific acquisition opportunities with shared documents, discussion threads, and milestone tracking.
• Events and meetups — In-app event management for virtual and in-person community gatherings, with RSVP tracking and calendar integration.
• Resource library — A curated collection of acquisition playbooks, templates, checklists, and educational content accessible to members based on their subscription tier.
• Push notifications — Intelligent notification system that keeps members engaged without overwhelming them — new deal postings, replies, event reminders, and community milestones.
• Subscription gating — Tiered access that unlocks progressively deeper community features, driving upgrade behavior and sustaining monthly recurring revenue.

Admin Panel

A community platform is only as good as the tools that manage it. We built a full admin panel that gives the Acquisition Network team complete control over the ecosystem:

• Member management — View, search, filter, and manage all community members. Approve new signups, manage roles, and handle account issues without touching code.
• Content moderation — Flag, review, and moderate community posts and discussions. Set automated moderation rules and escalation workflows.
• Subscription management — Monitor active subscriptions, track MRR, manage plan tiers, and handle billing issues directly from the dashboard.
• Analytics dashboard — Real-time metrics on member engagement, retention, subscription growth, and community health. The data the team needs to make decisions, all in one view.
• Event management — Create, schedule, and manage community events. Track attendance and engagement from the admin side.
• Push notification controls — Send targeted or broadcast notifications to specific member segments, subscription tiers, or the entire community.

The Relationship: On-Site Collaboration

This project was not built over email. The Acquisition Network team visited our headquarters, sat with our designers and engineers, and saw firsthand how we work. That visit changed the dynamic of the engagement entirely.

They saw our design process — how we iterate through concepts, pressure-test user flows, and validate assumptions before writing a single line of production code. They saw our engineering workflow — how we ship incrementally, test continuously, and maintain quality without sacrificing speed.

That in-person collaboration built a level of trust that carried through the entire project:

• Design iterations — We went through multiple rounds of design, refining the mobile experience based on direct feedback from the client and their community members. Every screen was reviewed, discussed, and approved before development.
• Testing cycles — Structured QA sprints with the client's team testing real scenarios — onboarding flows, deal room interactions, subscription upgrades — not just checking boxes.
• Coordinated launch dates — Go-live planning was done in lockstep with the client's own acquisition calendar, ensuring the platform launched at a moment that maximized community adoption.

Revenue Model: Subscription-Driven MRR

The application is designed around a monthly subscription model that creates predictable, recurring revenue for Acquisition Network:

• Tiered plans — Free, Professional, and Premium tiers, each unlocking progressively deeper access to deal rooms, resources, networking features, and priority support.
• Seamless upgrade paths — In-app upgrade flows that make it effortless for engaged members to move to higher tiers as they see more value.
• Retention mechanics — Community engagement features (streaks, badges, milestone celebrations) that keep members active and reduce churn.
• Revenue visibility — The admin panel surfaces MRR, churn rate, tier distribution, and lifetime value so the team can optimize pricing and retention strategies in real time.

Looking Forward

This MVP is the beginning, not the end. Acquisition Network has additional applications on their roadmap, and the trust established through this engagement has set the foundation for a long-term build partnership. The platform architecture was designed with extensibility in mind — clean APIs, modular feature sets, and a shared backend that future applications can plug into.

We do not just build products. We build relationships that produce products — and this one is just getting started.

Results

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