I failed a Skool business. Here is how to not repeat it!

I’ve launched and (somewhat) failed a community with 100+ members. This took me 13 months, over 1,000+ hours of 1:1 sessions. Learn from my mistakes, so you don’t have to repeat them!

Pick your niche well!

Programming sounds great, because there are so many people making a lot of money doing it. After all, I taught myself programming, so why not do it for other people? The perfect origin story! The only problem is with the type of person that wants to learn coding. They don't make good money now. Customers that don’t have huge buying power for your product are not the easiest. You have to convince them a lot, for low return.

Don’t promise free things for too long.

I promised free coaching to people until they got a job. This resulted in over 13 months of free work for some people. Only one of them got the job. Not a good way of making money.

Don’t be the smallest in your niche.

I went deep into a niche that is full of alternatives. There is college education which spits out hundreds of new programmers every year. Then there are bootcamps that can do things on a way better scale, and they already have a reputation. My value proposal was not good compared to theirs.

Stick with a single audience type.

I changed the language of my content from Polish to English. This killed my YouTube channel and any leads from the Polish market (which is my native market). I was competing with 1-2 people in the Polish market. On the English market, I was competing with 100s of super successful people already. As you can imagine it sucked big time. From 1-2 new customers for paid offer I got 0 since the switch.

Don’t commit to delivery of things you can’t control.

It is tough out there to get a job. Even if somebody has all the hard skills there is still no guarantee they will get a job. The tech job market is a mess. It was super frustrating to help someone for so long and see no results. This was one of the biggest reasons behind my decision to abandon the project. I lost motivation and didn't like my message anymore.

So those are my mistakes I hope to not repeat with the next community! What lessons you have from your fails?

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