Case Study · Membership Platform
The Cleaning Standard
A custom membership platform tied into a XenForo community via API — tiered memberships, a business directory, and an AI-powered knowledge base.
The situation
The Cleaning Standard set out to do something the cleaning industry has never had: a home for skilled, disciplined cleaning professionals — where the craft gets taught properly, and where homeowners can find professionals who actually meet a standard.
That vision does not fit in a brochure website. It needed a real platform: a community, structured training content, member tiers with different access levels, a directory homeowners can trust, and a way to answer members' technical questions at any hour. This is the largest platform build we have shipped.
What we built
A custom site tied into XenForo, via API
The community runs on XenForo — proven forum software members already understand. Around it, we built a fully custom website that talks to the forum through its API: one account, one login, one membership. The custom site handles the marketing, education, and directory surfaces; the forum handles discussion — and the seams don't show.
Tiered memberships
Professionals join at different levels, and the platform enforces what each tier can see and do — across both the custom site and the forum, kept in sync automatically. Upgrades unlock content, community access, and directory placement without any manual admin work.
A business directory homeowners can trust
The public-facing directory connects homeowners to member professionals — the "find a professional you can trust" half of the platform's mission, powered by the same membership system.
A RAG knowledge base with AI answers
The platform's training material lives in a structured knowledge base with a retrieval system on top (RAG — retrieval-augmented generation). AI bots answer member questions by pulling from that curated knowledge base — not from the open internet — so answers reflect the platform's actual standards. Members get expert-grade answers at 2am; the experts' time goes to the questions that genuinely need them.
The public directory
The homeowner-facing half of the platform: a searchable, map-driven business directory of member professionals, distributors, and flooring stores — with members already spanning the US and beyond.
Why it matters
Most agencies stop at websites. This project is a product: authentication across two systems, payment-gated tiers, structured content, retrieval infrastructure, and AI integration — shipped as one coherent platform. It is the same engineering muscle behind our client dashboard and the AI lead systems we run for service companies, applied to a community at industry scale.
If your business idea needs more than a website — memberships, directories, AI, integrations — this is the proof it does not require a Silicon Valley budget.
Building something bigger than a brochure site? Start with the consultation.
Ready to grow?
Ready to be found?
A full audit of your website, local SEO, and paid ads for $129 — credited to your first month if you become a client.