Yesterday I commented in the Skool Classifieds. A few minutes later, I got a DM: "You'd be a great fit for my community!" Well... that's exciting. 😄 So I clicked. It was a community for... Bearded men. 🧔 I looked in the mirror. Double checked. Still no beard. I briefly considered growing one for the sake of community research, but Todd suggested I stick to studying communities instead. 😂 It did make me laugh because it reminded me of something. Sometimes we're so focused on finding more members that we forget the goal isn't more people. It's the right people. Thankfully, I survived the experience with my chin still smooth and another research note for the notebook. 🤣 Has anyone else ever been invited to a community that made you think, "I'm pretty sure you have the wrong person..."?

Maybe Todd can predict the future of this? 👀 https://www.skool.com/synthesizer/the-old-model-is-dead?p=4125478a

A gentle one to start the week, and it's about your community, not this one. A lot of us carry a quiet belief that caring about people and earning a living from that care are somehow in tension, that the purest way to help is to do it for free. And that belief, however noble it feels, can quietly wear a builder down. Here's the reframe worth sitting with... A community that can't sustain the person running it eventually can't keep showing up for its members either. Taking care of yourself, including being paid fairly for real value, isn't the opposite of serving your people. Sometimes it's what lets you keep serving them at all. No agenda here, just something worth making peace with before it becomes a real challenge. Where might you be treating "serving people" and "sustaining yourself" as opposites, when they might actually need each other?

On Friday, I promised I'd share the single most important thing this first research project taught us. Here it is. And it's not really about outcomes at all. For a month, we ran the research project alongside the community. We'd post prompts, ask questions, host sessions- all this extra activity layered on top of everything else, hoping people would show up to the "research." And somewhere in the middle of it, it hit me. We were doing it backwards. The research was never supposed to be a separate thing we run on the side. The community is the research. Everything that's already happening here, the questions you ask, the wins you share, the things you notice in your own communities, the honest comments, the conversations that wander somewhere unexpected, all of that is the data. We don't need to manufacture research activity. We just need to pay attention to what's already alive, in this room, in your communities, and in the wider world of people building things worth belonging to. Once I saw it, I couldn't unsee it. Some of the most important insights this whole month came not from anything we planned, but from a member saying something offhand in a comment that turned out to be the whole point. The research was happening whether we orchestrated it or not. Our job wasn't to create it. It was to notice it and reflect it. That changes how we want to do all of this going forward. Including next month. You already know August is about monetization. So, here's how we're going to approach it, in light of what we just learned. We're not going to study monetization from the outside, like a textbook topic. We're going to notice how it's already happening, right here, in our own communities. Because here's a thought I can't shake, and it's where we'll start... Your community is already monetizing every single day, even on the days you're not selling anything. We just haven't been looking at it that way, yet. More on that this week. For now, I'd love to know...

Prediction #1: Tomorrow, July 28th, 2026 Skool will officially roll out "Global Fast Payouts," meaning creators in more than 100 countries will start seeing their money transferred the same day. Prediction #2: They will further officially announce that multi-language support is launching next week. If both of these happen, our members from all over the world are going to be thrilled. -- Welcome to a new weekly tradition. Every Monday, right before the Tuesday Skoolers call update, I'm going to put my reputation on the line and make a few predictions about what's coming. Then we'll see if I got it right, and more importantly, we'll talk about how to put those updates to work in your own community. So what do you think? Sound off below, and I'll see you after Tuesday's call for the verdict.