You bet, there are loads of community platforms out there.

Most just give you the basics – create channels, let people ask questions, have a chat, standard stuff, right?

But when you’re building a community, you need more.

You need engagement.

You need gamification.

You need a really good mobile app.

That’s where Skool comes in. 🙂

Let’s dive in.

Features	Skool
Type	Community platform
Pricing	$99/mo
Does it offer a trial?	Yes. It has a 14 days trial
Competitors	Circle, Mighty Networks, Kajabi

Overview

Skool was founded by Sam Ovens in 2019.

Before it, he founded consulting.com to help consultants and coaches up their game.

However, Sam noticed a lack of solid community-building tools in the market. There were Facebook groups and other platforms like Kajabi at that time, but they were not focused on community building.

Now, Sam is full-time into Skool!

I was truly prompted to use Skool when I saw their really good exponential growth rate, which even surpassed more established tools like Circle.

Also recently, Alex Hormozi invested in Skool,stating it was the biggest investment of his life.

Upon closer inspection of the platform, I noticed Sam Ovens implementingnumerous growth flywheels and other mental models, such asnetwork effects and feedback loops, to elevate the platform to the next level.

With online community-centric learningbecoming the next big thingand academic education declining, I’ve developed a lot of conviction in the platform due to the direction and positioning of the Skool.

👍 I’ve been observing the Skool’s growth for the last 1.5 years and finally started using it more recently. I am using the platform to host my community on how to build systems using Notion – called “Notion Growth Builders”.

Quick decision

👍 What do I like about Skool?

• Intuitive UI/UX: You witness higher engagement in the community due to their real intuitive user interface. Members feel right at home!
• Discover feature: Skool comes with a “Community discovery” feature, similar to Facebook’s search function, that helps you discover communities and generate more organic leads for your own community. Personally, I found really good communities to join with this!
• Gamification: It provides members’ engagement-boosting features like points, levels, leaderboards, streaks, etc – and showcases them on member profiles.
• Courses: It comes with course creation features with drip functionality. You can even unlock the courses based on levels members unlock
• Calendar: It has calendar feature enables you to schedule events, and ecen make certain events only accessible to members on certain levels.
• Mobile apps: Skool offers feature-packed iOS and Android apps for learning and interaction on-the-go.

👎 What we don’t like about Skool?

• Missing marketing features: Skool lacks proper marketing features such as checkout customization, ability to add order bumps, and upsells.
• No built-in live stream: Requires YouTube Live or Zoom for live events.
• No automation: Lacks automation workflows for triggers and actions inside community.
• Limited integrations: Skool doesn’t natively integrate with popular platforms, you need to rely on Zapier.

Upfront bottom line✨:

I firmly believe in the potential of Skool, especially since it was created by Sam Ovens. His focus is not just on the number of features, but on improving community engagement rates and driving success for product users. In fact so far, this is fueling the product’s growth loop!

Regarding the community engagement, the platform’s commitment to gamification is truly standout, and it significantly improves user engagement and accountability.

I firmly believe Skool is the “ClickFunnels moment” for online communities.

But.

It currently has limitations when it comes to course creation, automation, integrations, and overall depth of features, it’s important to remember that it’s still under active development.

Despite these gaps, you can consider using a Skool for your community needs.

However, if you are looking for more evolved platforms, you may need to consider Circle (from the founders of Teachable) or Kajabi communities.

Explore Skool

👉 My views on Skool’s future features: The entire platform is built around Sam Ovens’ coaching framework, so we can expect more features like challenges, the ability to track habits for community members, and accountability mechanisms for getting results. Overall, the focus on driving real transformations to the community members.

User interface

Skool’s user interface is very minimal and intuitive. There is not a lot of clutter.

There are 6 different tabs available:

• Community: Engage with members.
• Classroom: Access all your courses.
• Calendar: Stay updated on upcoming events or webinars.
• Directory: Find and connect with other community members.
• Leaderboards: Showcases highly engaging members.
• About: Provides a brief highlight about the community you are browsing.

These tabs are themed around the five essential aspects of every community: engagement, learning, events, connect, and gamification.

Additionally, discussions within a community can be organized into different topics or channels.

👍 Personally, I and many others found that Skool’s community engagement rates are higher, mainly due to their intuitive interface, unlike platforms like Circle. Which is the ONE THING that makes/breaks your community, and they’ve nailed it.

Among all the filtering and sorting mechanisms, one feature that I really appreciate is the ability to sort content by “Best (this week)”. Helps a lot for irregular members.

👉 Bottomline: Overall, Skool’s interface is really minimal. Whenever new people join your community, they instantly understand the community and it’s organization without thinking much.

Adding members to the community

When creating a community or group in Skool, there are 4 ways to invite people.

1. Invite via email (best way to import course-specific students): Manually enroll members with their email addresses to certain courses.
2. Invitation link: Share an invitation link for easy community access.
3. Import CSV: Import member lists from other platforms using CSV files.
4. Zapier integration: Automate member addition using Zapier. Say when people buy your product on ThriveCart, auto-send them invite!

Also based on various conditions, you can provide access to the training courses.

👎 As of now, when it comes to importing CSV files, only one column of email addresses is accepted. I really hope that they allow us to specify to which course the email address belongs, so that the CSV import process would be more streamlined.

Creating community content

Skool has a simple content editor that offers several features, such as including links, conducting polls, and embedding videos.

Their post editor not only has the ability to write content, but also includes attachments, links, videos, and even conducts polls.

👎 However, the major downside is that their text editor is not a rich editor. This means you can’t bold or italicize text. To circumvent this limitation, people are using Unicode bold and italic tools, like this one here, to make long-form content more readable.

Gamification in Skool

Skool is a gamification-centric community platform. That means in Skool, the community members will be unlocking various perks as they engage more in their community.

You will be levelling up as you gain more points in the community.

So how you gain points?

It’s through interaction with other members’ posts.

1 like = 1 point.

In summary, the more you add value within the community, you will level up.

You can also set the courses or products that your community members can unlock as they further engage in the community.

Skool offers the best in class gamification features.

You can see when people reach level 2 and level 3 they will be unlocked in many more products.

Let’s consider the “Synthesizer School” community.

For members at levels 3 & 4, they are offering free weekly accountability calls and Synthesizer profile templates.

Here’s an interesting feature.

As a community owner, you can only set the Chat to be unlocked at a certain level (Say Level 2!)

This helps a ton of avoid spam!

Member profiles

Skool is one of the very few platforms that provide rich member profiles.

It feels like you are viewing an Instagram profile.

You will get data like:

• Member level.
• When they joined.
• Last active time.
• Course completion percentage.
• The number of contributions, followers, and following (with list).

With this, you will already have a lot of context when initiating conversations with any of the community members. Really useful!

And also Skool does the job of community engagement, more habit forming.

Streaks!

There is a unique daily activity chart available in Skool

The activities it track include:

• Post likes
• Posts published
• Comments and
• Voting on polls

💝 I’m recently considering incentivizing people to regularly contribute in my community by rewarding consistent streak holders with some custom t-shirts (which they would feel proud to wear), gift vouchers, or whatnot.

Online courses

Course structuring and uploading

Skool is a platform centered around community and course creation. While it may not have the extensive features of dedicated course creation platforms, it offers a host of unique capabilities that cater to most users’ needs.

When creating a course, you can structure the content by folders and different pages. Skool refers to the different lessons inside the folders as ‘pages’.

As you may have guessed, currently, theSkool does not support native video hosting abilities. But it’s in their roadmap. Keep an eye 👀

As of now you can embed videos from popular video hosting solutions.

👉 Most people resort to Vimeo for hosting videos, but it isn’t piracy-proof. Instead, I recommend using Bunny Stream. It offers built-in download and piracy protection, and it’s more affordable than other paid platforms.

For each of the pages, you can add descriptions, action items (for proactive learning), lesson transcripts, and also start or pin/map a lesson-specific discussion thread to a course’s lesson page.

Course access

Here are the different course access levels in Skool:

• All Members: When people join the community, they get instant access to basic courses (like my Notion Starter course and LifeOS video series)
• Level-Based: Some content (like free templates and Core AI prompt library) requires members to interact and level up in the community to unlock
• Buy Now: Members can purchase direct access to specific courses within the community platform
• Private: Restricted access for courses sold through external platforms like ThriveCart, requiring manual or automated enrollment

And also if they need access to my course on Life Blueprint Design, then they need to pay a one-off fee of $97.

Course player (student experience)

Refer to the screenshot below to see how the course (classroom) looks on the front end.

The interface has a clean and neat UI.

👉 Contrary to what you may think, students don’t have the ability to leave standalone comments below the lessons. Instead, you, as a course creator, need to assign various threads (pre-existing) related to the course lessons so that users can engage in them. This also keeps old threads evergreen.

Also, as students go through the training course and mark the lessons as done, the course completion percentage progress bar will progress.

The same course completion percentage is shown on profiles, promoting transparency and accountability.

To sum it up:

Here are the key features of Skool courses:

• Structured course creation with folders and pages
• Flexible course access settings (all members, level-based, or purchase-based)
• Course completion tracking with progress display on user profiles
• Integration of discussion threads with specific lessons
• Clean, intuitive course player interface for students

👉 Other than these features, Skool doesn’t come with other course compliance, assessment, and course certification features.

Calendar and events

Skool has a native calendar feature where you can create and schedule all the events for members to take a look at.

As shown in the screenshot above, I have set up a recurring event for our weekly Mastermind call every Wednesday.

👉 Also, you have the option to specify who can attend this event, such as members at a specific level or those enrolled in a particular course.

However, please note that Skool does not have native live streaming capabilities.

Therefore, you need to utilize either Zoom or Google Meet integrations.

Here’s the good thing:

The founder is a big believer in live events in the community to build that rapport and communicate the mission with the community members. So, we can expect some big updates in this regard.

Design, customization, and landing pages

Compared to other platforms, Skool provides limited customization options for your community.

You can make minor changes like adding thumbnails and logos for personalization.

However, Skool lacks multiple theme choices and does not allow the use of custom CSS code to make your community distinct from others hosted on the platform.

Additionally, Skool does not support the custom domains feature, so all your communities will be hosted under Skool’s subdomain as www.skool.com/[community-name]/.

👍 Skool intentionally limits design customization to maintain a consistent user experience across all communities on their platform. This helps users feel familiar and comfortable when navigating different Skool communities. Think of Facebook groups, you feel right at home even after joining a new community.

Also for building landing pages,, you may need an external platform like ThriveCart, Kajabi, or even Elementor with WordPress to have more control over checkout.

Nevertheless, you can’t fully expect landing page building functionalities in Skool, but it will provide enough flexibility to add your own branding and let the “Skool” as a brand do the heavy lifting for you.

But, fortunately, as of now, according to people’s experiences, the Skool community’s about page converts really well with cold Facebook ads.

Integrations

Skool does not have any native integrations.

But they provide Zapier and Webhooks to integrate with 1000s of tools and services.

Here are some of the workflows you can create with Zapier + Skool.

• Ask for members’ emails (in membership questions) and directly add them to your CRM.
• Grant access to a member who bought a product on ThriveCart.

You may think that you rely on Zapier for everything, right?

But luckily Skool has webhooks support. 🙌

For example, if you use Thrivecart as your payment solution, its webhooks can automatically add students to Skool upon checkout, eliminating the need for Zapier.

Mobile apps

As I told you, Skool comes with apps for both iOS and Android. They are feature-rich!

The great thing about these apps is that they give you the ability to send push notifications to all your members, further increasing community engagement.

Skool pricing and support

Skool has only one pricing plan at $99 per month that comes with all the features it has to offer, but you will only be able to create one group or community with this plan.

Skool’s pricing plans are straightforward and don’t limit the number of students in your community.

It’s highly unlikely that they’ll introduce tiered pricing.

👉 Here’s the good thing: Alex Hormozi, Skool’s primary stakeholder, stated in a YouTube video (I watched it months ago) that they are not focusing on maximizing profits using tiered pricing. Instead, they aim to disrupt the course creation and community market.

Ans when it comes to support, you can either email them or post in their public community.

FAQs on Skool

1. Who is behind Skool? Skool was founded by Sam Ovens, who also established and is the CEO of Consulting.com. This platform aids individuals in launching their consulting businesses.
2. Who is Sam Ovens? Sam Ovens is an entrepreneur hailing from New Zealand. He founded Consulting.com and also SnapInspect.
3. What is The Skool Games? School Games is a competition launched by Alex Hormozi, where you receive detailed guidance on how to build a profitable community. The top 10 participants are selected every month and they get a chance to spend a day with Alex in Las Vegas.
4. Is Skool worth purchasing? Absolutely. Skool possesses excellent community features, particularly for gamification. All these features are accessible for just $99 per month. It’s certainly a worthwhile investment.
5. Does Skool offer any trials? Yes, indeed. Skool provides a 14-day free trial, allowing you to experience the tool firsthand.

Wrap up

I’m really optimistic about Skool’s future, especially given it’s a brainchild of Sam Ovens, someone I genuinely respect.

Having following him for 3-4 years, I can tell that his focus is not just on the features, but on driving real results for the people who use the product, so that they spread the word, thus feeding the product’s growth loop.

They are not aiming to be a Swiss Army knife of community building, but their motto is to nail the basics and focus on improving the KPI’s necessary for community owners’ success.

Skool does offer some fantastic features, like promoting community engagement and gamification. Also, it presents an intuitive user interface and user experience.

However, I am waiting for them to implement better course features and also integrations with various email marketing and shopping cart solutions. Because as of now, you need to use Zapier only.