Hey Brandon!
I’m one of these freelancers who do this for a living for over a year now. However I’m a bit concerned — you’re saying you need a Discourse (this community) lookalike within Coda? Or was that a figure of speech?
Running a full discussion board within a Coda doc wouldn’t be a good idea. Coda is a doc, a single file if you wish; it’s not scalable enough and it doesn’t provide necessary access control means. I expanded more on this before.
I hope this was just a figure of speech and you don’t actually want to recreate discourse — but simply have a space for some discussion. But even then I’d rather advise other tools specifically for this.
That said, I’m still curious to learn about your use case. I realize it may be a totally valid one.
Welcome to the community, by the way!