My $100k Skool mistake · Skool Community

My $100k Skool mistake

Last year, I made a huge mistake when launching my Skool community. Although it generated $100k+ in cash collected in less than 3 weeks without a big launch (I made a post about that here), this post breaks down where we went wrong and what we’re doing now.

For context, we’ve been selling $5k-$100k packages for the last 5 years, focusing exclusively on helping people sell more coaching offers, via organic social media & DMs.

We had a hypothesis that if we launched a $1.2k per month membership, we’d create a vetted, super-exclusive community that coaching offer owners really need.

So, we put together a live webinar to sell the first 50 spots…

It took me about 4 days of straight work to get it good enough to launch.

After all, this was just a test, so it didn't need to be perfect.

We sold out, fast (in less than 3 weeks as my other post explains)…

But things got a little… confusing… when we surveyed every single person who joined…

We asked them questions like “why did you join,” “what outcomes do you want to get to,” and “who are two high calibre individuals you could refer to Impact School?”

Out of all 43 of the 50 members who completed the survey…

Only 1 mentioned they had joined for the vetted community (which we were thinking was our key selling point in our hypothesis above).

Actually, ALL but one of the members had joined:

To sell more coaching offers in a leveraged/semi-automated way (ideally breaking the $100k per month mark)

To dominate the news feed on social media and sell in the DMs

To become the authority in their industry and build an audience that love them

So we made a HARD pivot.

We switched out front-end offer back to a coaching/implementaton offer, delivered through Skool (actually, our customers love it being delivered there so much that we’ve referred tons of people to use Skool, to run their coaching offers on, and are now teaching them how to do it)

And we only offer the access to the Skool community (with coaching sessions, access to our GHL whitelabel without paying the subscription fee, and all our step by step training materials to sell via social media) for $299 per week, as a back-end once someone’s been through our implementation offer.

We aren't planning to sell our Skool community as a front end anymore - maybe things will change in a few months..

Going back to doing what we were doing before, with more hand-holding, support, and systems implementation… has been amazing for us, and makes the first $100k we made on Skool in 3 weeks, look like childs-play.

Surveying your customers is way more valuable than surveying leads. Take feedback from people who have paid you money way more seriously than those who are just leads.

Assumptions kill businesses.

Make data informed decisions.

And enjoy the epic interview Sam and I recorded recently.

PS - offering coaching on Skool has been great. It requires a little more operational skills on the back end to track customer journeys, so if Skool can add some features to deliver group coaching and 1:1 coaching, too, that would be EPIC!

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