I want to take a minute this morning to tell you something I’ve been sitting with. Yesterday was incredible. The bake at the end of the day. The thread that ran 1,700 comments deep in 21 hours. The way you all showed up for each other. I sat back last night just reflecting on what this place actually is. I spend time in other corners of Skool where community owners hang out. I listen to what they’re working on, the challenges they have, the strategies they use. I’m usually the quietest one in the room. I hear them talk about something called engagement mining. They build artificial scenarios inside their groups to bait comments and likes, because that’s how you climb the rankings on this platform. There are over 191,000 communities on Skool. The ones in the top 10% typically have thousands of paying members, big advertising budgets, and full-time staff working to keep the numbers up. I look at what we’re doing and I just feel grateful. Because we’re a unicorn. Most of the big communities on this platform are some version of: “Join my group and I’ll show you how to make a million dollars by Thursday.” We’re a collection of home bread bakers. That’s it. And here’s what that’s built: 📊 Skool tells community owners that 3% engagement is a healthy group. Ours is running around 56%. We don’t mine engagement. We don’t run paid ads. We don’t pay people to comment. We don’t gamify the thread. And you’re in the top 0.5% of every community on this platform. 🏆 #67 overall 🎯 #8 in Hobbies 🍞 #1 in sourdough and bread baking ⭐ #1 among ProveWorth 5-star certified communities on the entire platform And we’re surrounded by groups with tens of thousands of members charging anywhere from $25 to $2,000 a month. We’re free. I don’t know how to say it any way other than thank you. Thank you for showing up. Thank you for sharing what you know. Thank you for helping each other. Thank you for helping me keep this place clean and productive. When I spoke at Skool Magazine a month ago, I told them what I call the bathroom principle.

I want to give you a real update on something I’ve been building, and then I want to tell you about something that happened to me today. The update first. I’ve been heads-down on a new course called From Oven to Market based on my book of the same name. It’s the course I’ve wanted to build for years: how to actually sell the bread you bake. Pricing. Packaging. Booth design. Customer connection. Scaling without burning out. Nine modules, a full recipe library built for selling, an AI tool that turns your story into a real website. The whole thing. It should have been finished last week. It is not finished. Life got in the way the way life does, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. But it is close. Very close. I am in the last stretch and I want you to hear it from me before I start announcing dates. Here is the part I really wanted to share with you today. A box arrived on my doorstep this morning from a member of our community. Carolyn Bajoie runs a cottage bakery in Baton Rouge called NANA’s Old Fashioned Teacakes. She sent me a sample of her work. I want to tell you what that unboxing was like, because it is exactly what I am teaching in the course. White shipping box. Weight in your hands. Open the flap and there is pink crinkle paper folded over the contents, not stuffed, folded. Pull it back and there is the first teacake in a clear sleeve with a white label, a little teapot logo, “NANA’s Old Fashioned Teacakes, Baton Rouge, LA,” phone number right on the label. Lift it out and there are three more stacks underneath, sleeved, tied, labeled. Stacked the way you stack things you are proud of. I had not eaten a single bite when I started writing this. I needed you to understand the experience of the box first, because that is the lesson. Customers eat with their eyes. The first impression is the package. The anticipation is part of the product. Carolyn understands this in her bones. I am going to feature her ( @Carolyn Bajoie ) in the course as a real example of what presentation looks like when somebody takes it seriously. I will also tell you the teacakes themselves are excellent. Soft, lightly sweet, the kind of recipe somebody has been making for years and refuses to change.