Feedback: great UX, amazing product, lack of payment processing

I love the product so far as a student. Great idea that you took some inspiration even from GitHub, see the activity monitor of people, it's like commits on GitHub. If you check Discord or Slack, you can get further inspiration from how some people format `text` with [markdown](https://dillinger.io/) without pressing buttons. Some communities also have chatbots that gamify experience further, e.g. promote people based on activity to get access to further goodies, or e.g. in case of crypto, they get data from some API and post alerts people are looking for.

I don't yet know how easy it'd be to create courses. Course creator experience is in my opinion where ambitious startups like Educative in the tech niche have some catch-up to do (or I'd just have to hire someone to format my course material and be prepared to replace them from time to time when they quit). To get this right, you'll need to see what it feels like to upload Uplevel Consulting content and maybe take some interactive notes that require formatting, some tables here and there, some formulas or some embedded widgets (maybe custom html+css+jss embed to link external forms, pages etc). As I've created courses on Udemy, Teachable, Educative, Skillshare, Moralis Academy, Sitepoint, and I've gone through the publishing process of multiple tech publishers, I know how tough or easy the publishing process can be. Now I'm mainly working on my own school, but even there, I was picky with the platform.

Skool is better than Slack, because it looks more organized and can deliver training with table of contents (let alone calendar, calls, whatever you need). Facebook is like a dinosaur now.

One problem you most likely won't be able to solve with a small team yourself is marketing + legal/compliance. However, we often take make or buy options, and I am sure if you have enough paying members, service providers specializing in creating VAT-compliant payment gateways will give you an offer that you can build in the price. Payment processing is unfortunately a non-negotiable for me that locks me to Teachable whatever you do; unless I invest in legal compliance myself as a content creator.

In Europe, people in Brussels have too much time to invent stupid EU laws about VAT compliance. It's becoming a standard elsewhere too that you pay sales tax on info product sales. See e.g. the company Quaderno who specialize in this. If I sell the course, the customer has to pay VAT based on where they reside. Then the merchant either registers an EU one stop shop or registers with every single tax authority where they can potentially get a sale. Then you do some more administration, and soon you see it's a lot of manual extra work to do it with a consultant - so you'd end up most likely using an automated service.

So far, based on my experience, only Teachable has this service that they offer a payment gateway for you. Kajabi doesn't and other competitors don't use this feature. For books, I used Leanpub, they also chose to implement this feature. Udemy does this too, but there, I don't have control over pricing, so that's not an option for me. A payment gateway works such that the merchant collects course sales, handles all VAT questions, takes a small cut (e.g. 5% with teachable, 20% with Leanpub, which is ok for lead magnet books but not high ticket products), and wires the rest to the online school as monthly royalties. The online school then can be a one person show (like some of your Uplevel clients before they implement scaling the team first outsourcing sales).

There are full service solutions like Quaderno. Now, to be frank, there is a level of service, where you beat all your competition so much that I can just decide on paying you for Skool and transitioning to Quaderno paying them according to their pricing for sales tax: https://www.quaderno.io/pricing. However, I'd not expect this to happen in beta stage. This means, I'd most likely check how teams like Teachable or even the lot smaller Leanpub solve this problem, as Leapub is a very small team and they also managed to make it work. Then I'd approach a vendor like Quaderno for special bulk pricing once I have some paying clients, and dominate the online school market with whatever ways I can get online schools on board.

Another key element of this is the sales interface, including payment methods. I'd expect from a platform like Kajabi and Teachable to handle the add to cart / checkout process seamlessly, and their sales pages should also convert.

Someone else also wrote, it'd be great to white label Skool, which means, instead of the Skool logo, their own online school logo would appear. I'd not have this need personally, if Skool gets that good, I'd be a proud user just like how I am a proud user of Slack right now. However, the logo of my online school should be prominent if I pay for creating a course space, and I'd not have anything against a smaller "powered by Skool" logo.

These are just ideas, I'm happy to see the online course space grow. Currently, based on student experience alone, the best fit for my niche training would be writing my own LMS, Udemy, or Educative in the software development niche. However, you have no control over pricing on Udemy and it has a reputation to be cheap which I don't want. Educative has a bit to learn on content creator experience, let alone the flat 70% revenue share that is only suitable for cheaper courses, not high ticket products.

However, given Sam's background and infrastructure, it might also be a conscious decision to serve customers who charge high ticket prices, as they are expected to deliver a premium service anyway. Your promise in the original consulting funnel was that you help people scale from manual fulfillment 10k a month to 100k a month. Those who make even 20k a month, may easily pay 100-500 dollars a month for VAT compliance themselves after all, so you can simply expect the fraction of your customers to solve this problem themselves. The advantage of this approach is a clearly defined niche (Skool is for online education of premium quality and price); while this decision also somewhat limits growth and makes Skool more coupled with consulting.com's Uplevel product (including the threat of cross-financing making it hard to measure if you're successful because of or despite spending on Skool) to feed new customers. Here my business insight ends as I'm not in your shoes, I'm just putting myself in your shoes about what options I'd consider in your situation and as a customer, I'd understand both directions.

Background: software engineer since 2006, manager since 2014, content creator since 2015, mentor and online school owner since 2019.

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