Update on GrowthBoostGate🥲 · the skool CLASSIFIEDS

Update on GrowthBoostGate🥲

If anyone’s interested in the rest of the story here’s what I’ve found. And if you don’t want to read this just MAKE SURE YOU TURN OFF GROWTH BOOST. Fatal mistakes are being made.

Quick backstory: Skool has claimed 30% of a $250 a month subscription as their own for a client I have provided a complete paper trail for, who came via my own organic social media, saying she is a “growth boost client.” I’m now losing $75 a month (plus all the other platform fees) for a paying client I brought to the platform and Skool refuses to budge.

Skool support’s response was to agree this was unfair, suggest I refund the client and take payment off platform. To do this, I risk churn of $250 a month.

I shared, completely frustrated, what had happened in Skoolers and asked Sam Ovens for help.

He shut down comments and messaged me basically regurgitating what Support said and saying their back end showed my client searched for holistic health in discovery and joined that way. I’m still waiting on confirmation from my client but I have to say, even this sounds weird. Why would she go to browser, go to Skool, and search me in discovery when I had provided the exact link?

I pushed back and was basically told by Sam himself that they don’t have the manpower to check screenshots and “it has to work for 10s of millions of people.” And according to Support, there is no way to change attribution in their system. This means Skool rolled out a new feature with no way to correct mistakes.

But where things get sketchy. There was never a formal notification made to creators about growth boost, at least not one I received. I found out about it only after coming across one of my own ads in the wild and going actively to look in Skoolers and try and find out what I’d missed.

Skool (Sam himself) claims it works like an affiliate link system. However, according to the FTC in the US and EU consumer protection laws, AFFILIATE LINKS MUST BE DISCLOSED. Neither I nor my client were aware they were taking a (large) cut until I realized I had money missing. And not a little money. A lot of money.

My partner is a cybersecurity analyst and we requested the raw user attribution logs from Skool via email. Sam declined and sent a single screenshot via chat that did not show the claimed search query in Discovery.

This income is NOT passive income. It’s active, one on one hours for me. So it’s not “better than nothing.”

When I joined Skool it was because of things like discovery, affordable costs, and support for small creators. I loved the community here.

I’m now researching exit strategies.

I never thought I’d leave Skool. I love Skool.

If anyone else is in this boat (maybe a few steps ahead?) I’d love to know where you went and how you moved.

I am so upset. I never in a million years would’ve expected this from a platform like Skool. I always thought they had my back. But now, even though I’ve turned growth boost off, my trust in the platform is shaken (and I’m gone completely out of discovery and search… one of the core reasons I came to Skool).

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Update on GrowthBoostGate🥲