Notes from the July 30 mastermind call This came out of a paid Premium mastermind call on Growth Boost and where communities are heading. We share the substance of some calls with everyone here rather than keeping it behind the paywall. Not every community works that way, and there is a reasonable argument for the other approach. Our view is that if something material has changed on the platform, you should know about it whether or not you are paying us. So here are the parts that matter, whatever level you are at. Retention now matters more than engagement This is the biggest shift, and most owners have not adjusted to it yet. Skool has introduced the beginnings of an efficiency score that determines which communities get pushed through Growth Boost advertising. Historically the scoring leaned on engagement. Going forward, retention carries considerably more weight. Sam has said retention needs to be above eighty percent. Aiming above ninety gives you cushion. But do not conclude that engagement stopped mattering. It simply matters for a different reason now. Retention is what matters to Skool. Return on Investment matters to Skool. Engagement is what matters to you. People who never participate almost never upgrade to a paid tier. So engagement is not about a busy feed, it is about producing members who eventually want the next thing you offer. One practical warning that follows from this. Be careful about removing inactive members. Some owners have cleared out people who had not posted in a while. If retention is now scored, that may work against you. And here is the part nobody has a confident answer to yet. What do you do about members who have never participated, or accounts you suspect may not even be real people? Removing them cleans up your community and may damage the score that decides whether you get advertised. Keeping them protects the score and leaves dead weight in your feed. There is a real argument on both sides and the honest position is that it is not settled. Whatever you do, decide it deliberately rather than on instinct.

Drop your guesses in the comments and we'll hand out some prizes. Once we explain the reasoning, you'll have a framework for making similar calls in your own community. Going forward, we're going to do a better job of explaining why we're doing certain things, so you can put the insights to use. And if you want the full breakdown, join us on tonight's call. New About Page Text You Don’t Need Another Growth Community. You Need Growth by Design. Build a Skool community people value, return to, and recommend. More posts, more calls, and more tactics do not automatically create a stronger community. Growth by Design means knowing what matters most, fixing the right problem, and building each part of your member experience with purpose. Start with the 5-minute SKOOLME Checkup. It helps you see which area needs attention first: Substance, Kinship, Onboarding, Outcomes, Leadership, Money, or Engagement. Then choose one focused move, test it in your community, and learn from other builders doing the same. We study what works on Skool and turn it into practical experiments you can run in your own community. Members have called our onboarding the best they have seen on Skool. Skoolology is new. What works is not. Join free. Take the 5-minute Checkup and start designing a community worth growing. New Community Description Stop collecting growth tactics. Design a Skool community people value, return to, and recommend through focused experiments. Join free.

The next few weeks are going to be about monetization, and monetization needs traffic. Growth Boost might help in the short term, but what you really need is sustainable traffic that doesn't cost you 30% in referral fees. So we're launching a YouTube channel in the next few days, and you can follow the whole journey with us. I've been digging into research with vidIQ, but before we go further, we want your input. Why bother researching something as small as a channel name? Here's why: in the Skool growth space right now, men run 11 of the top 12 channels. That's going to shape how we approach this. The big question for you: what kind of content would you actually enjoy watching? Donna and I already disagree on what the first video should be. Maybe we'll just argue in every video? Comment Team Todd or Team Donna and you might just settle it. Team Donna, the Heart position People do not subscribe to information, they subscribe to people. There are thousands of videos explaining how to grow a Skool community and most of them are interchangeable. What is not interchangeable is why two people decided to build this together and what it cost them to do it. That story is the only thing on the channel nobody else can copy. Lead with it and the people who stay are the ones who actually belong here, not the ones who came for a tip and left. You are not trying to reach everyone. You are trying to find your people, and your people recognize themselves in your story. Team Todd, the Data position Your first video teaches YouTube who to show the channel to. Origin story videos on new channels get watched by people who already know you, which tells the algorithm to keep showing you to people who already know you. That ceiling is low and hard to break later. Search volume tells a different story: nobody is typing "why did they start Skoolology" into YouTube, but plenty of people are typing versions of "why is my Skool community dead." Answer the question people are already asking, earn the impressions, then tell the story to an audience that exists.

Updated: Includes video walkthrough. Drop your answer in the comments and closest wins!

There's a moment every community builder experiences eventually. You're scrolling through Skool, checking out what other communities are doing, and you see it: your idea. Your framework. Sometimes even your exact language, lightly reworded, presented as someone else's insight. Your first instinct might be frustration. Mine was a smile. What we noticed As our community has grown (we're close to breaking into the top 200), we started seeing a pattern. Other Skool growth communities began talking about things we built in from day one. Breakdowns of other communities. Easy implementation of ideas instead of theory dumps. Structured rollouts rather than content chaos. Could that be a coincidence? Sure. Is it likely? No. When multiple communities start echoing your approach shortly after you gain traction, the simplest explanation is usually the right one. People are watching, and people are borrowing. Why people get this wrong A lot of creators get bent out of shape when someone takes their ideas. "You stole this from me" becomes a whole identity. They spend energy policing imitators, calling people out, protecting territory that was never really theirs to begin with. Mark Twain settled this argument over a century ago. He wrote that "there is no such thing as a new idea. We simply take old ideas and turn them in a kind of mental kaleidoscope, creating new and curious combinations from the same pieces of colored glass that have been in use for ages." He was right, and we're proof. We didn't invent reviewing what works. The tips we share came from studying other communities, noticing what they did well, and trying to improve on it. Everyone is turning the same kaleidoscope. The people upset about being copied usually forget where their own ideas came from. That said, when I saw our specific framing show up elsewhere, I'd be lying if I said I didn't notice. I just drew a different conclusion from it than most people would. Imitation is free market research When someone borrows your idea, they're telling you something valuable: they looked at what you're doing, decided it works, and bet their own time and reputation on it. That's not theft. That's validation you didn't have to pay for.