$1,035,987.93 in 1 Year on Skool... 12 Lessons From The Last 12 Months

Aug 22 (edited) in Other

12 months ago (August 2023), I made this post where I broke down how my Skool community went from 0 to 100k in 20 days.

$1,035,987.93 later, … Here are 12 things I’ve learned from 12 months using Skool…

#1) TTV (time to value) makes or breaks LTV (lifetime value)

The quicker you can get each new member a win, the longer they’ll stay.

We noticed that our members who, on day 1 or 2 after paying us, share this one specific template on their social media and to their email list…

…They stay on average 60-90 days longer than those who wait until day 3 or later.

Now, when someone pays us, we even send that one template to them via email so they don’t even have to enter the classroom to get it, and we tell them to share it before anything else.

Figure out what your “quick win” is, and your profit margins will thank you later!

#2) Less is more

When I interviewed Sam (the interview is here) about running a successful community a year ago…

I didn’t “get it” when he told me “less is more,” for communities. After all, my team and I had been offering bespoke consulting and coaching for the best part of a decade.

But after doing an 80/20 analysis on the components of our offers and looking at what really drives member and client results…

20% of the “stuff” = 80% of the results.

When we cut all the stuff that they weren’t using to get results, guess what happened?

Our members were GRATEFUL and thanked us for always helping them more and more to drive the core desired results they’d come to us for.

Trim the fat and your members will be less overwhelmed… And they’ll commit fully to the small actions they must take to win.

#3) Skool needs to add different payment plan options.

-Annual

-Pay for the year in 2 payments

-Pay for the year in 3 payments

-Weekly

-And then the current monthly billing (But change it to every 4 weeks so we get that extra payment cycle each year, c’mon… we all learned that one from you Hormozi!)

Ok, let me get back to the lessons lol.

#4) In person meetups are key,

I ran a live event in London, and 70+ business owners from Australia, USA, Dubai, Asia, and all around Europe came.

Not all of them were members, we invited some guests...

But out of those who were members, not a single person who came to that event has left the membership since then. And 8 of them upgraded into our multi-5 figure high ticket packages.

Investing in physical events is key.

#5) We lost a LOT of money by not setting our Skool group up as an upsell machine

When I made the post last year, we were playing around with a “high ticket” Skool group which was 1200 every 4 weeks or 10k for the year.

What was interesting was that a lot of those buyers (6-9 months in) told us they invested in a high ticket agency/social media system elsewhere…

(We had done a VERY bad job of setting up our Skool group for upselling)

Now, we’ve taken our price WAY down so it’s 199 per 4 weeks. Or 2k paid upfront for the year…

And we’ve stripped back the delivery so the value’s huge but it’s definitely not a high ticket offer (for example there’s no 1:1 or multiple times per day coaching and training sessions like we have with our high ticket)

We have a welcome video which says “as soon as you’d like to speak about working closely together, book a call”

And we have a team engaging in the Skool group daily to support our members, and flagging anyone to our sales team who could be qualified for a conversation.

Using Skool as a breeding ground for perfect clients for our high ticket (and making that VERY clear in our “sales video” for our Skool community on the “sign up” page) has been SO key.

#6) Upfront billing is SO important

52% of our members pay upfront for the year.

24% split the payment into 2 (so we collect after 2 months).

3% split the payment into 3 (so we collect after 3 months)

21% pay every 4 weeks (it’s a 1 year minimum commitment)

That means we collect $520,000 out of $1,000,000 on day 1 versus over a year.

Add an upfront billing option and watch your members commit more.

#7) Segmentation is key

We used to have just 1 group. There were people of all revenue levels there.

Now, we have different groups depending on revenue level and size of business. So the content is relevant to where you’re at and what you’re working on. Plus it allows each community to feel intimate and personal.

The same team runs all of them and it’s not much extra work except 4-6 additional hours of calls per month. Negligible when it comes to the ROI and increase in LTV.

How can you segment your people, so they get the support they need and are more likely to upgrade in the future / stay for longer?

On this note - we don't offer our Skool to everyone. If they're qualified for high ticket, we don't even mention it and most of our high ticket clients don't even know about our Skool, since we're using our Skool community as a way to breed dream clients for our high ticket.

#8) Social media wins for client acquisition.

Organic reach nowadays is crazy.

Share your best stuff on social media… More people will see that than those who’ll see your paid stuff, free content is how people judge you and your paid offerings.

Investing in nailing organic content always pays dividends.

#9) You REALLY need to have good stuff in your membership.

There are a LOT of groups out there now.

Focus on driving member results above all else to increase retention.

#10) Skool groups as an OTO (One Time Offer)

Sorry for all the marketing acronyms lol.

This is something I’m launching in the next couple weeks, but I know a ton of people this is working for.

Running a low ticket offer on the front end (like 17-47 dollars) then once they buy, having a page to upsell into Skool membership.

This is how to increase ROAS on the front end instead of waiting some days or weeks to get a return with a high ticket funnel.

I’ll keep you posted on how that’s working for me, and you may start seeing my ads out in the wild lol.

#11) Have fun

This one is a bit cheesy, but when you make it fun for you, your members will have more fun and stay for longer.

This kinda business is a blessing.

We quite literally get paid to share what we know.

Yep, it can be a grind. Stuff breaks. We make mistakes….

But ultimately, how lucky are we to get to do this everyday?

Never let go of that gratitude. It makes for a better being.

#12) Horizontal + Vertical niching is key

When the same kinds of people/business owners are going to the same outcome, that makes for an epic community.

I’ve always found the best way to nail the messaging and niche to be getting on 50-100 sales calls and writing a list of the pains and problems people tell me they have…. Then highlighting the answers from the people who actually gave me money.

Feed that into Chat GPT to get the data breakdowns (then check to make sure it was accurate) and you’ll come up with the angles you need in no time.

12 months ago, our whole offer was around “generating high ticket clients.” Now, we focus specifically on high ticket offers that want to land 5-10 additional high ticket clients per month using organic social media, and our messaging is around:

- Increasing ads costs

- Changing algorithms

- Not being clear on your messaging/how to write content that gets reach

Getting into the trenches to nail your messaging is SO MUCH EFFORT. But it might just add a couple zeros to the end of your bank balance ;)

Ok, so that was a lot! I hope it was helpful.

That said, if anyone has any questions feel free to ask them. I will try to get back to all.

Grateful to serve,

Lauren Tickner

P.S… From this 1M in Skool membership fees, we’ve seen $320k in high ticket client payments (direct from members of our Skool groups) which is pretty low, since we were testing pricing and delivery for the majority of the year... Now we’ve nailed the pricing and number of calls, what’s in the classroom etc, I foresee this will be above 1M in the next 12 months, but let me keep you posted with next year’s “one year on” post.

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