Transcript
Today we are going to be building one of the most overlooked parts of running an AI automation agency, or any agency for that matter. And what that is, is a client portal. The reason why this is important is that it is the key for you to have low refunds and low churn. More importantly, it leads to more upsells, higher customer lifetime value, and more referrals.
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Note from Softr: If you're looking to build secure, tailored experiences for your business, check out our solutions for building custom client portals in minutes.
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The entire premise of having a client portal is handling the customer experience after you have closed the deal. Getting them to actually pay you and acquiring a customer is absolutely the hard part. However, what is equally important is their experience throughout the lifetime of that project, which is why we are building a portal.
They need to know exactly what is happening so they enjoy working with you. Because they had such a good experience, they are more than happy to refer others to you. If you don't know what a client portal is, it looks something like a centralized list of all your projects.
You invite your clients into the system so they can see things like milestones, progress updates, communications, and deliverables. When you have built something, they can log in to actually see it and know what is going on. This helps them clearly understand the results and recognize what they paid for.
We are going to be building this exact portal together using an end-to-end AI app builder called Softr. It is super easy to use, and you are going to build it in under 10 minutes. We are only going to use a very simple prompt to show you how simple it can be.
You can see the completed portal that I was just showing you, which was entirely built with AI. Let's step back and build it together from scratch. I am going to copy the prompt that I used for this so we can walk through the entire process.
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Note from Softr: You can easily kickstart your application by simply describing it to the AI co-builder. It builds complete apps, pages, and database schemas instantly, while still giving you the freedom to tweak everything manually.
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What I want you to do is go to softr.io and just quickly make an account for yourself. Once you log in, you will be taken to a screen where you can actually build your apps, Softr Databases, and Softr Workflows. We are going to focus on building the app here together.
You can build it from scratch, but in this day and age, we want Ask AI to do as much of the heavy lifting for us as possible. That is why it is amazing that they have this generate with AI option. When I click on that, it is basically just going to ask what we are building today.
I will paste my prompt in here, which simply says to build a clean, modern client portal for an AI automation agency. It specifies that clients should be able to log in, track progress, and see milestones, deliverables, and updates. The more detail that you put in here, the better it is for you in terms of the final outcome.
I just want to show you what it creates with a simple prompt when I hit enter. The cool part is that the AI Co-Builder is going to take over from here. It is a fully fledged AI app builder, so it is going to ask us some questions instead of making blind assumptions on its own.
I prefer when tools ask clarifying questions so things can be done correctly the first time around. It asks what clients should be able to do inside of this portal, and for right now, we just want them to view and leave comments. Next, it asks how we want to organize work for clients, and we will choose one project per client for now.
Then it asks what the main dashboard should focus on, and we will select the overall project status and the next milestone. The huge benefit of this is that the client can log in and instantly know exactly what is going on. They aren't chasing you in WhatsApp groups or worrying if anything is actually happening.
It then asks how users will log in, and I am going to pick email, though you can use any method. Since it is not a public app, I am going to select the option to invite my own users. We click continue, pick the layout we prefer, and select a dark design theme.
We click on create app, and it is going to get to work generating our portal. Once it has done all the work, it will say your app is now ready. I am going to click on try it live so we can see what it output for us.
Now we can see the preview version of our app, which looks very similar to the original example but populated with your specific data. You can instantly view project overviews and see how many projects you have on the go right now. Whether you are building an AI voice receptionist or a brand identity redesign, you can stay on top of all of the projects you have.
There are popular tools out there like ClickUp and Notion, but we are currently in an era of custom builds. You want to build this to your exact specifications to match exactly the features that you need. Why pay an ongoing fee for an external service when you could just build yourself and have complete control and flexibility?
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Note from Softr: Building custom project management tools natively in Softr allows you to tailor every feature to your exact workflow while securely exposing data to your clients without per-seat licensing fees.
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That is my mentality now, as I just want to build my entire tech stack myself. It is incredibly cost-effective, and I maintain total authority over how everything functions. If I don't like any of the generated features, I can easily edit them.
Let's open up a specific project, like an e-commerce platform build. We can see the entire status of it, when it started, the targeted launch date, and any notes about it. We can see the milestones for every stage of this project to check if we are on track.
This is important for us to track internally, but it is much more important for the client logging in. They load up the portal and can clearly see that the team is currently on the design mock-up stage. That tells them exactly where things are at so they don't have to question or worry about delays.
You also have a deliverables section, which is a great option when you complete a specific phase of the work. You can upload a Google Doc to explain what you built or attach a Loom video demonstrating the new feature. Clients get these live visual updates alongside their standard written updates.
In addition to keeping clients happy, this structure is great for managing your own developers and internal teams. Once you have a larger team, you need them to have accountability on what they are doing and where their time is being spent. You can use a portal just like this to track all of those internal operations.
If you ever want to add additional features, you can just go back into Softr and prompt it to add commenting functionality. It will process the request and suggest adding that capability directly to the item details block of the project. It clarifies these things before making visual decisions, which prevents the AI from going rogue and building something you don't want.
Now the notes and comments options are added to our live page. You can easily add a project note explaining a 24-hour delay due to a server outage, and it gets saved directly to the database. The client natively gets notified about what is going on, allowing for seamless back-and-forth communication.
Beyond using Ask AI, it is important to understand that the visual interface is built entirely using modular blocks. Everything encompassed inside of a visual section on your screen is considered a block. If you want to expand a specific project page, you can simply click on add block to open up an entire block library menu.
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Note from Softr: If a native block doesn't quite fit your advanced layout needs, you can simply use our Vibe-Coding block. Just prompt for the exact custom component you want, and Softr will instantly generate it and connect it to your database seamlessly!
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