2d (edited) • 💡Research Notes
What Actually Changed on Skool This Week
Notes from the July 30 mastermind call
This came out of a paid Premium mastermind call on Growth Boost and where communities are heading.
We share the substance of some calls with everyone here rather than keeping it behind the paywall. Not every community works that way, and there is a reasonable argument for the other approach.
Our view is that if something material has changed on the platform, you should know about it whether or not you are paying us. So here are the parts that matter, whatever level you are at.
Retention now matters more than engagement
This is the biggest shift, and most owners have not adjusted to it yet.
Skool has introduced the beginnings of an efficiency score that determines which communities get pushed through Growth Boost advertising.
Historically the scoring leaned on engagement. Going forward, retention carries considerably more weight. Sam has said retention needs to be above eighty percent. Aiming above ninety gives you cushion.
But do not conclude that engagement stopped mattering. It simply matters for a different reason now.
Retention is what matters to Skool. Return on Investment matters to Skool.
Engagement is what matters to you.
People who never participate almost never upgrade to a paid tier. So engagement is not about a busy feed, it is about producing members who eventually want the next thing you offer.
One practical warning that follows from this. Be careful about removing inactive members. Some owners have cleared out people who had not posted in a while. If retention is now scored, that may work against you.
And here is the part nobody has a confident answer to yet. What do you do about members who have never participated, or accounts you suspect may not even be real people? Removing them cleans up your community and may damage the score that decides whether you get advertised.
Keeping them protects the score and leaves dead weight in your feed. There is a real argument on both sides and the honest position is that it is not settled. Whatever you do, decide it deliberately rather than on instinct.
You still have to bring your own traffic
A lot of people got excited about Growth Boost because they dislike marketing, and hoped Skool would handle everything. It is now clear that does not work. You do not get much amplification unless you are bringing traffic to the table yourself.
For scale, some of the top groups are spending over one hundred thousand dollars a month on their own advertising. Most of us are not competing on that ground, so the traffic has to come from somewhere else. Social media, YouTube, LinkedIn, a newsletter, partnerships, or a free tool that lives outside Skool and points people in.
Here is the part that stings. Most owners spend roughly ninety percent of their effort creating content inside their community and almost nothing marketing it. Going forward you need to spend as much time marketing your community as building it, and probably more.
And there is a second reason beyond the algorithm. If Skool changes direction, the people with no traffic of their own are in serious trouble.
Skool is the hot platform right now. Others are already being built.
Stop guessing at your cover image
There is a shortcut here that most people ignore.
The top few trending communities in any category are trending because they convert. Their cover images have been tested far more thoroughly than anything you will produce on your own.
Look at what those images have in common structurally, then build your own version in your colors with your photo and your positioning.
Meta makes the final call on what gets pushed, so the honest constraint is that you can make any ad you want, as long as Meta likes it and it converts.
Copying a proven format is a much better starting point than designing from scratch. It is not a guarantee, since what works in one field may not work in another, but it is a far better bet.
Worth knowing that there are people on this platform whose entire job is testing which creative converts, and their own communities are visible to anyone who goes looking. Most owners never think to check.
What is a realistic conversion rate
A lot of people are panicking over numbers that are perfectly fine. The old advice was to aim for twenty percent for Freemium groups. That number came from warm traffic, meaning people who already knew you and received a personal invitation. Very few people hit that anymore, because everyone is saturated with requests to join things.
On cold traffic, meaning people who know nothing about you, the realistic numbers are far lower than most owners expect, and low single digits is normal rather than a failure.
Price changes the expectation too. A free group carries almost no risk to join, so it converts higher than a paid one. Those are not comparable numbers and should never be judged by the same standard, though plenty of people do exactly that and conclude something is broken.
Also worth knowing: at large volumes, high percentages become impossible. A small percentage of a very large number is still a great many members. The groups winning on low rates are moving enormous traffic, and building that takes time.
One more thing. If your community is public and indexed by search engines, your traffic numbers include search crawlers and competitors reading your About page. None of that is a real prospective member, but all of it lands in your denominator and drags your reported rate down. Know what is in your numbers before you judge them.
Skool is going global, and languages are coming
Skool is expected to release a translation feature within roughly two to three weeks.
Text translates easily, so your titles, descriptions, About page, and written material are the simple part. Video is where the decision sits. Tools like HeyGen will redo your video in another language and re-render your lips so it looks like you are actually speaking it, while keeping your tone, for a dollar or two per video.
Subtitles are the cheap alternative and better than nothing, but they create a real disconnect. When your lips do not match the words, it is distracting, and it makes it harder for someone to connect with you, especially on longer videos.
The practical advice is to start with where your members are actually coming from rather than where they might theoretically come from, and to look at whether anyone in your niche is already doing this.
A related point on pricing. Nine dollars is not nine dollars everywhere. As memberships globalize, the same price becomes a very different decision depending on who is looking at it.
Think about where the economy is going
Zoom out for a moment. AI is displacing jobs and that is not slowing down. A lot of people are going to be looking for something, sometimes fairly urgently. Look at what is trending on Skool right now and it is overwhelmingly about making money.
The question worth asking about your own community is whether it helps people make money or save money. Not every community is built for that, and you should not distort what you do to chase it. But often you already have knowledge that saves people money and have simply never framed it that way. If you know a field well, you know where the money leaks in it. That knowledge, packaged as a bonus, is a strong reason to join.
And a closing thought
People who seem to predict the future are usually not predicting anything. They are looking at what is visibly coming and adjusting before everyone else does. Growth Boost did not appear overnight. Development on it started roughly two years ago.
When you brainstorm about where to take your community next, do not brainstorm with someone conventional. The most creative and unconventional thinker you know will give you better answers than the most sensible person you know.
Created by Todd Thornton, Skoolology.
Premium members get the live call and a customized playbook from every single call, built to be uploaded straight into their own AI tool. It reads what the AI already knows about their community, then works through each of these decisions with them specifically: their price, their traffic, their retention, their numbers.
It argues back where it should, and it ends by writing out what they decided and what they agreed to do. The point is not more information.
It is having something walk the decision with you rather than handing you a summary and wishing you luck.
3
3 comments
What Actually Changed on Skool This Week
skool.com/skoolology
Stop collecting generic Skool growth advice. Take the 5-minute SKOOLME Checkup, find what to fix next, & test 1 research-backed move. Join free today.
Leaderboard (30-day)
1
🔥
+534
2
🔥
+359
3
+262
4
🔥
+243
5
+158
Powered by