Update (20-01-2023): Hormozi started showing his magic for skool and he just launched “skool games”. Skool games will help anyone who doesn’t have a proven offer, an audience, or any specific expertise a way to start their own business and make money!
From last week, I am seeing a disucssion emerging around an online community and course hosting platform. Many online marketers who were monetizing facebook groups are transitioning their facebook groups to that platform. And the name of the platform is skool. In this review post I will try to uncover the reasons why they are doing so. Let’s start…
Facts Sheet
- Site: skool.com
- Vendor: Sam Ovens, New Zeland
- Operating Tenure: 5+ Years
- Category: Course and Community SaaS
- Free Plan: Supports FREE account to join other sklool communities
- Upgrades: 1 Group = $99/m (Unlimited Features)
- Minimum Payment Threshhold: None
- Payment Hold Time: for Affiliates 14 Days, for Community Creators’ offer subscription 8 to 13 days)
- Payout Method: Bank Account via Stripe
- Payday: Wednesday
- Affiliate Cookie Policy: 30 Day Last Click
Although my research says skool has been around for a while (started back in 2019) as a better alternative to Facebook Group, all the recent hype on “Leaving Facebook Group for skool” started when renowned internet marketer Alex Hormozi published the following post:
In that post Hormozi says:
BIG Announcement I just made the largest investment of my life into Skool.com — a platform with millions of users that makes starting your own online business simple, easy, and fun. I’ve been looking for an opportunity to make starting a business accessible to EVERYONE. And after four years…I finally found it. Skool is that opportunity. To give you an idea, users are joining Skool communities so fast that host payouts are growing by 62%…PER. MONTH. (Not a typo). If that sounds interesting…we’ve got something big coming. It involves business. Competition. Money. Prizes. And most importantly, you. It’s like nothing you’ve ever seen before. You’re gonna love it. More Details to follow…stay tuned.
And after that I see more and more experienced marketers started sharing posts on transitioning their Facebook group to skool. But as a marketer I wondered what’s in it for them, and for people interested in building online courses and communities…
When I dived deep to find out the reasons, the following problems were apparent for Facebook Group:
Problem with Facebook Group that Marketers Don’t Like
- Recent alogrithm changes in Facebook is favoring profile contents over groups and pages
- Getting featured on Facebook Discover is getting harder for new groups to get organic inboud leads
- Engagement in Facebook groups are going down year on year
- There are more groups in Facebook that people can remember and you can only pin so many groups in shortcut for quick access.
- Spammers and novice marketers are ruining the culture of many Facebook groups natural flow (there are people who even dare to join new Facebook groups for that)
- Monetizing Facebook group directly is not possible, you have to make the payment happen in outside channel or funnel
- Facebook Group contents are not discoverable from Google Search
- Facebook is notorious for restricting Facebook Profile for exccessive usage, and marketers don’t like that
- Automating certain repeatitive tasks inside Facebook Group is not possible. Example: Automatic Personal DM upon Joining etc.
- Facebook also don’t like people use automation plug-ins to automate friend requests, dms etc. It may ban you for that.
How skool is solvoing some of these problems of Facebook Group
There are certain things skool has solved for course and community builders that makes it an interesting alternative to Facebook Group. They are described below:
- skool is designed to give joy and color to communities and courses
- They incorported gamification inside skool communities. There are leaderboards, points etc. to motivate people take action and unlock more features inside individual group
- Monetizing skool group is a breeze. You can give certain contents inside a course for free and lock other contents inside a paywall.
- skool made it easy to get payments for course creators. They made their own payment processing system bypassing stripe in the process.
- skool charges less than stripe. Currently it is charging 2.9%+30c for trasactions.
- skool is SEO optimized. Groups can be discoverable from Google search. Public groups contents can be found in Google search.
- skool supports automatic personalized dm to new members upon joining.
- Overall the user interface of skool is very easy and intuitive for both course and community creators and members.
- Finally the affiliate opportunity of skool is intriguing to make the decision to transit from facebook breeze
skool Affiliate Opportunity
skool has an amazing affiliate opportunity. You can earn recurring commission by promoting skool. The commission plan is very straight forward – 40% per month. This is how it works:
- You join skool as a free member
- You get your affiliate link from Settings » Referrals
- Promote it online to its target audience
- Start getting 40% commissions per month when people sign up from your link and create and maintain a community inside skool
This is the straight forward approach. You don’t need to apply to skool to become an affiliate, you get it by default.
But there is another way for getting affiliate commissions. And I think for this most of those marketers started creating their groups inside skool. This is how it works:
- You create your own skool group for $99/m
- You start inviting people to your group as a free member or paid member
- All those people who join your group will be counted as your referrals for skool
- If anyone of those start their own community inside skool, you will get 40% recurring commissions for the lifetime of that group.
So you see the hype around skool real. There is huge monetary incentives for doing so…
How to withdraw skool subscription and commissions once earned?
skool works with stripe to payout commission to your bank. The hold time is 14 days for affiliate commissions. But people can directly pay you without the help of stripe with its in-house payment technology.
Course and community creators can get their clients subscription fees within 7-14 days. skool pays these commissions and subscriptions every Wednesday.
Cons of skool
skool is doing great things in course and community tech segment. But it is not without cons…
- You can’t host your videos inside skool, you have to use 3rd party video hostings like Youtube, Vimeo etc.
- At this moment, you can’t do live streaming inside skool, and without having this capability it can’t pull a large pool of facebook group owners to the platform.
- skool is not spam free, I have got a few people reaching out to me from the groups and started pitching…
- You can’t have access to your referrals’ email address in skool
- skool referral attribution system has a catch. The first skool group I joined was cloudkii group. So, I thought cloudkii should receive referral commission if I create a community inside skool. But I engaged in “skool community” before trying to test the system and found this:
So, that means, owner of the last group you hanged around will be entitled to receive affiliate commissions if you create a community inside skool. Although that is not a problem, but I can’t accept official “skool community” to receive affiliate commissions in this case… because it is the founders group. That being said, I appreciate how it is showing the affilaite attributions clearly in the sign up page.
So what I recommend regarding skool?
skool is definitely a good platform for course and community creators. So, you can use it for your groups and courses. I like the intuitive user inteface of skool. Definitely a good contender in course and community tech market. But still I think it requires more time to see how it changes in the coming years. The market is very competitive, it is already facing real competition from Circle and soon from GHL. I would keep an eye on it. If you are already considering skool to build a community outside Facebook platform, I can recommend it to you if you can forgive the ability to do “live call” inside. You will enjoy the simplicity and user-friendliness of that platform. But if you are not in hurry, then I would say take time, that is a better recommendation from me.
P.S: if you just got interest to promote skool as an affiliate but wondering how to do it with more clarity, here’s my clarity doc to help you understand the process. Hope you’ll enjoy it.