Welcome, @Tyler Rohm ! So glad you found us through the Directory. Congratulations on building a community with a clear purpose and a place where your members can feel like they belong. That's a strong foundation. Wishing you all the best as you work toward your first paid member. Looking forward to learning together and hearing what you're discovering along the way! 🤗

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.

Today's live session is shaping up more like a mastermind, so I've extended it to a full hour. Yes, it's about Growth Boost, but it's so much more than that. We're getting into community strategy: how and whether you should adjust your approach once you factor in the bigger trends reshaping things. Any success I've had in business has come from looking at where the market is going, not where it sits today. My favorite quote comes from Wayne Gretzky, who credits it to his father: "I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been." That's what this hour is for. Figuring out where the puck is headed for your community, and what that means for the moves you make now. Come live if you can and bring your questions or drop questions below in comments. Implementation guides go out later today for anyone with access.

Here's a quick update of the Skool update call earlier today mostly about Growth Boost. Sam Ovens (Skool CEO) suggested Skool owners do the following to maximize "Growth Boost". 1- Fix your packaging: cover image, group description, and About page. This is what shows in Discovery and gets used directly as ad creative. 2- Make it instantly obvious what the group is and who it is for. Study the groups currently on Discovery Trending for examples. 3- Add your social links under Settings, then Profile, then Social Links (YouTube, X, Instagram). Growth Boost now reads these to understand your audience and to pull content for ad creatives. 4- Put your Skool link directly in bio on every platform. Link aggregators like Linktree or Stan Store do not count, and the algorithm is being weighted to favor direct links. 5- Bulk edit your YouTube back catalog to insert the Skool link in every video description. 6- Drive your own traffic to the About page early. Groups getting the biggest boosts are usually the ones already pushing traffic themselves, since that creates the data signal the system scores. They will be using an "Efficiency Scorecard" to determine what ads get shown. The five things being measured: 1- Clear market niche, the narrower the better. Fantasy crochet beats crochet. 2- Price between $5 and $200 per month, with $20 to $100 as the sweet spot. Too low and ads cannot pay for themselves, too high and conversion drops. 3- About page conversion rate above 1%. (Remember this is cold traffic converting to paid) Note that this figure naturally falls as volume rises, which is normal. 4- Trial conversion rate of 40% or better, if you run trials. 5- Retention above 80%. Worth knowing Efficient groups working the best currently receive $5,000 or more per day in dedicated Skool ad spend, with dedicated campaigns and custom creatives. The team expects that to climb toward $10,000 per day. The efficiency score lags, so new groups need time to accumulate data before the system can act.

Congrats to @Muskan Ahlawat and her AI Automation Club. She's now only 19 members shy of 1,000. I believe she has the most members of anyone in our group right now followed by @Michael Wacht at 825 members in his AI Bits & Pieces. Keep up the great work!