Why your new Whop app is invisible to members (and the ten-second fix)
If you added an app to your whop and it seems to have done nothing, this is almost certainly why: a newly added app is private until you change it. Only you and your team can see the tab. Your members cannot see it at all, and nothing tells you that.
We found this the hard way, on our own whop and then on other people's. Three companies installed our support app and every one of them showed zero seconds of use. Not low use. Zero. It looked like people had installed it, glanced at it and walked away. That was wrong. Nobody had walked away, because no member had ever been shown the tab.
How to check in ten seconds
Open your whop in a private browser window, where you are not logged in as yourself. Whatever you can see there is what a member sees. If your new tab is missing, it is private.
The fix
Do this part on a desktop browser, not your phone. Right click does not exist on mobile, so if you are in the Whop app you will not be able to reach this menu at all. That trips people up more than the setting itself does.
- Right click the app's tab in your sidebar. Left clicking just opens the tab, which is what most people hit.
- Choose Change visibility.
- Pick Product gated and select your product, so members who have that product can see it. Choose Public instead if you want people who have not joined to see it too.
That is the whole fix. It takes about ten seconds and it is the difference between an app that works and an app that looks broken.
Do it for every tab, not just new ones
This catches people on tabs they set up months ago. Our own onboarding tab, the one that tells new members where to ask questions, sat private for days while two hundred people joined and never saw it. The welcome screen we had carefully written was visible to nobody but us.
Worth checking, in a private window:
- your welcome or start-here tab
- your support or help tab
- any course or content tab you expect members to reach
- anything you added in the last month and have not looked at since
Why this matters more than it sounds
Whop members decide fast. A member who asks a question in their first hour and hears nothing is the member who leaves, and early reviews are written by exactly those people. If the tab that was supposed to answer them was invisible, you never find out what went wrong. You just see someone leave.
The reason this trap is so easy to fall into is that everything looks correct from the owner's side. You added the app. You can see the tab. You clicked into it and it worked. The only view that tells you the truth is the one you never look at, which is the logged-out one.
If you use DeskCrew
Our Support tab has the same default, because it is a whop app like any other, so the same three steps apply. After it is visible, open it once and choose Import my content so answers come from your own courses, posts and product pages rather than generic text, with the source shown on every answer.
If anything looks different from the steps above, tell us and we will correct this article. It was written from real installs, and the menus do change.