Hey Skool... buddies?
Happy to answer whatever questions you like.
Ok, so main things to know:
- I run a company called AJ&Smart, we're a digital product studio and innovation training company (we help companies like Lego, Google, GE, Amex etc with their digital products) which also sells online courses (mainly to teach people how to Facilitate Workshops)
- For the specific online course side of the business, we use Skool to funnel people from ads/youtube videos (example)/books and other activities into a Free Group called "Facilitator Club"
- Facilitator Club is focussed on helping consultants in the product/innovation/tech space move from being people who have to execute tasks for their clients to just being involved in the strategic/up-front work like "ideation". We also have a lot of people from other industries in there too who just want to move toward strategy and away from execution. Here's the group: https://www.skool.com/facilitatorclub (Please only join if you think it might be relevant).
- This free group is full of little things to keep people engaged, primarily using the Leaderboard system to help people "unlock" courses and resources. These actually help people to preview the quality of our paid stuff.
- The free group acts as a "holding pattern" for people to move to our paid group which costs €6000 and now almost has 1000 members.
- The free group isn't the only way people are getting into the paid group, but it's definitely been an amazing place to "warm people up" before moving them to the paid group.
- On a good month, the entire system can generate upwards of $700k (gross revenue) with a 56% profit margin... which is quite cool!
- We are now in the process of slowly building out a recurring revenue system from our paid group (i'll share if that actually works soon)
- The MAIN REASON a free group is so great is that it's such a low friction "lead magnet" for potential customers. "Join our free community" is so much more tantalising when compared to "Download our ebook" or "watch our VSL"
- Our goal in the next 12 months is to double down on this method of acquiring leads and to keep pushing people from our channels to our free group VS pushing them to a VSL.
That's pretty much it!
The thing that I think make Skool uniquely good for making everything above work well is how easy it is for our customers to use AND how we can integrate "unlocks" into the leaderboard stuff. That's just genius. Customers can essentially unlock teasers for our courses!
Hope that was somewhat helpful to share!
Cheers,
Jonathan
P.S. I don't see a category that really fits this post... there used to be a "how I use skool" one so I'm just gonna choose...whatever