Skool communities are NOT the right place for finding clients & after 3 months of posting and networking, I’m quitting.

No hate to AI skool communities, I think the owners are doing a great job at running them but here are a few things that I’ve noticed:

Creators have built these communities as a funnel to sell courses, or hire talent. Disguised as a highly resourceful and professional place for networking.
If you are a beginner who wants to learn AI, this is the perfect place to start.
If you’re an agency owner looking for solid leads, this isn’t the right place (more about that later).
Most communities are full of scammers where they will spam on your posts for engagement and then try to fish you.
It is a deadly bubble where your aspirations will be brought up & when you enter the market you’ll have to face harsh realities.

Let me explain:

How it all began? Creators made these communities years ago promising to teach people how AI works and how they can start their own AI Agencies. Nothing wrong with that. If you’re new to the technical world, you will learn a lot here. This is why you’ll find a LOT of learners. Now that right there is the problem itself.

These communities have also been marketed as good places to find business owners and leads, but the type of content which they have consumed before joining the community is a bit misleading. They have an expectation of getting an AI solution cheap and quick & when you add in beginners to the mix, they are going to promise the same.

Don’t get me wrong, some businesses just need a simple voice agent or a chat bot which are easily implemented (that too using other saas apps, where the developer has to do absolutely nothing). But I’ve had a lot of leads where people expected to build scalable systems with thousands of concurrent users, like: reception & admin system for a network of 9000 restaurants, a huge community based matching system for tutors and students all over UK, AI cold call assistant with real time feedback and a huge CRM. Now guess what was the budget range of these projects? $0-$3000 :)

One thing could be, that some business owners simply join these communities to exploit new developers who are ready to build such systems for cheap. I mean it’s the business who will ultimately face the loss when these projects fail. The developers will only end up learning more and making a quick buck on the side.

However, if your strategy is to create a few template agents which work well for small businesses, this might be the perfect place to start. You can charge very low and play the quantity game. But in my case where we are into developing custom systems, skool has mostly provided unqualified leads. My goal was to join them and find fairly medium to large projects, but that hasn’t been fruitful. Hence I’ll quit this strategy and not waste much time. [ But I’ll surely post more stories from my experience ;) ]

P.S., do let me know how do you guys find such qualified leads :)

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