Organic SaaS Growth Newsletter
How Skool.com is silently becoming a mammoth community platform
A research into the growth strategies of Skool.com
Privately launched towards the end of 2019, Skool.com hosts about 1000 communities today.
Unlike Discord servers and Facebook groups, these are revenue-generating paid communities.
Skool is bootstrapped and consistently growing — launching new features, acquiring more users, and hiring employees, indicating a cashflow-positive business.
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Surprisingly, Skool is mostly absent from mainstream startup media coverage and discussions on social platforms, strikingly contrasting with its more famous, bigger, and VC-funded rivals.
But the company is making itself known to the people who matter — its market, thus looking like a well-oiled, lean growth machine.
A study of its growth strategies made me realize that they are driving most of the growth using strategies other than paid ads.
Hence, you can take a leaf out of Skool’s book to grow your SaaS business.
Let’s dive right into Skool’s growth playbook.
Start with Meta
From the very beginning, team Skool set up a meta community to discuss the product and started using the platform — they started using Skool to discuss Skool.
Doing so has three benefits:
- Usage from early on helped test the product.
- Discussion around the product created a repository of insights to improve it.
- It created a live community where new members could join and feel the product without the need for any member-created community. It became easy to demo the product.
It is a time-tested strategy. Long ago, Stack Exchange, the parent company of communities like Stack Overflow, set up its meta community, Meta Stack Exchange, for “bugs, features, and discussions that affect the whole Stack Exchange.”
Launch to a low-hanging audience
Skool was founded by Sam Ovens — a maverick though occasionally controversial internet marketer who made millions by selling high-ticket online courses.
Before Skool, Sam was running a big and engaged Facebook group of independent business owners. During Skool’s soft launch, he shifted the community to Skool from Facebook. In a matter of days, about 5000 new users flocked to Skool.
At that time, Skool did not have a pricing plan in place and let these users in for free. My guess is it was intentional to maintain the parity between the Facebook group and Skool, get early users for product experience, and generate product improvement insights.
Chances are you do not have such a large audience to soft launch your product to. However, you can play to your strengths and find an ‘easy-to-acquire’ audience with consistent efforts.
Make smart offers to the early tribe
Community platforms are unique in that you need to balance both ends of communities — demand and supply, i.e., you need community creators and members.
Will there be members without a community?
Will a creator create a community without members?
Skool solved this double-whammy by leveraging its pool of early members who migrated from the Facebook group.
They offered to create free communities for those members who were creators with significantly large audiences.
Creators got free access to launch their communities on Skool, bringing more users to it.
Skool asked members to apply to become community creators and made the offer on a case-by-case basis instead of offering it to everyone. It ensured the quality of users and personalized onboarding to the most lucrative customers without stressing the resources.
Lean content strategy using content that converts
Skool created content that establishes the positioning and answers the market’s biggest questions. Such content converts prospects to customers at a high rate.
Here are some of the topics they talked about:
- My new company: Skool.com
- It’s time to ditch Kajabi + Facebook Groups
- Skool vs Discord?
- 6 Ways people use Skool to make money
- What is Skool?
- Skool VS. Facebook Groups (Engagement)
- Group Funnels on Skool?
- Some valuable nuggets — new features and use cases
- How do you create an engaging free group?
- Popular Interview I Did (Skool’s origin story))
- Skool’s Roadmap (what’s coming soon…)
- What does a high-quality community look like? (example)
- How to create a 100% engaged community
- How Charlie Morgan makes $500k /month on Skool
- The math to $100k+ /yr with a subscription community
- Skool vs. Circle. vs. Kajabi vs. other platforms…
I don’t know about you, but these headlines look pretty impactful to me and give a fair idea of what Skool is.
In the mega content strategy research, I have discussed the importance of business context in designing a content strategy.
Sam Ovens has been building an email list for over a decade. I don’t know its exact size, but by reading between the lines and discussing with people who have followed him, my guestimate is that it has at least a few hundred thousand subscribers, if not millions.
And that’s a massive content distribution leverage.
Skools uses this email list to publish ‘headline-driven’ content with social proofs from members’ community posts. The topics I have listed above are email subject lines. Here is an example email:
Let’s look at Skool’s business context:
- It is a horizontal product; therefore, you can see use cases in the list above.
- It is a new and premium entrant in a market dominated by established and free players; therefore, it relies on user-generated content to establish a value proposition.
- It has a massive distribution advantage; therefore, it can benefit from short-form but thought-provoking email copies backed by testimonials.
- It’s one thing to leverage distribution and attract new sign-ups and another to make them actively use the product. Hence, they share ways to make a community successful and create engaging groups.
Skool’s content strategy is unlikely to work for your business if you copy it as it is. But if you establish a business context and then design the content strategy around it, you will find amazing hidden ways to succeed.
Progressively increase product scope
You might consider product scope related to product management and not with growth, but in the world away from theoretical discussions, the scope has everything to do with growth.
A wrong scope can adversely affect the launch, acquisition, and monetization.
When you spend resources and time building things the market does not want while overlooking things they prioritize, you hinder growth by design.
It is not uncommon in the SaaS world to take months to launch that one feature the market really wants while prioritizing the development of features nobody cares about. In such cases, many growth activities and experiments get delayed, killing the overall momentum.
The trick is to limit the product scope and progressively launch well-tested and tight-knit features — keep the product free from bugs and glitches and spend resources in the direction customers want.
Skool launched a well-working MVP with less scope and routinely added new features. They launched the product without the key features like payments and integrations but added them along the way.
In fact, they use their progressive product scope as another conversation point to engage with the market.
So, if you want to excel in growth, keep the scope tight and in resonance with the market’s wants — build fewer features but build them well.
Growth loop: Affiliate program on steroids
Skool’s affiliate program seems to be its biggest growth channel.
However, it is not your regular run-of-the-mill affiliate program. It is an irresistible offer, a growth loop, and in a league of its own.
Skool is free for community members and charges $99/month from community creators for each group they want to create.
All users — creators and members, can refer Skool to others and earn 40% of their monthly subscription fee for life.
That’s a lot of commission for a long time when most of the SaaS companies offer 20% for just 12 months.
But that’s not the best part.
The best part is when you realize that you can start a group on Skool by paying them $99 a month, bring in members to your group, and if just three of your members start their groups, you can use Skool for free forever!
Take it a step further, and if more members start their groups, you can even turn Skool into an income stream!
To facilitate the required attribution, they have set up an auto-attribution wherein if a member starts a new group by clicking the ‘create a group’ link while being inside your group, they attribute that customer to you.
In terms of grand potential, another company whose affiliate program is in the same league as Skool’s is Click Funnel.
Growth loop: Built-in SEO
On most platforms like FB Groups, Discord, and Slack, the content you post on a community stays private and invisible to the world outside the community.
Skool has a built-in SEO for the content you post on the communities. Each community post is a fully SEO-optimized web page that can rank on Google. Such content can bring more members to the communities hosted on Skool — the more active a community is, the better its SEO gets, and the more love it can get from Google!
SEO growth loop takes time to build, but when it works, it brings high-intent traffic for free!
Tactical Activities
- After two years of building the product and achieving initial traction, Sam Ovens appeared in podcast interviews. He has been a long-time YouTuber and fully understands the channel. By appearing in different podcasts, he captured their audiences and promoted Skool.
- Skool paid social influencers for shoutouts — it can bring short-term traffic and help build momentum.
That’s all I wanted to talk about the Skool’s growth strategies. Some of these strategies will fit your business, while others will not. So be prudent about it.
You can sign up for Skool here.
