This could change everything for Skool

Everyday I see Skool community owners requesting new features and functionality for the platform that would improve the experience for them and their community members. Functionality that would often make a huge difference in the impact they have and the revenue they make. Many times these are feature requests that would benefit a large group of community owners but for others they would be kind of useless. So it’s understandable why the Skool them wouldn’t implement these; They are no core features, the platform would quickly become overwhelmed with features and would lose the simplicity and ease of use that has attracted so many community owners in the first place.

Shopify faced a similar challenge in 2009. They were stuck between keeping their platform simple and adding features some merchants needed to grow. So they launched the Shopify App Store, which was crucial to Shopify becoming one of the major players in e-commerce. This let merchants and developers add extra features to their stores, but only if they wanted them. It didn't change how simple the main platform was for everyone else. Even the apps that get added have to follow Shopify UI and UX guidelines and must be approved by them. After the App Store launch, Shopify's growth took off. They went from a small Canadian startup to a global e-commerce giant, now powering over a million businesses worldwide. Until this day their App Store is one of their biggest moats against other ecom platforms.

It seems that Skool is kind of going this route with Plugins. The next step would be to open the Plugin store and allow developers to create third party plugins through the Skool API. Here’s how everyone wins with this:

-Community owners get extra functionality that might be not a core feature of the platform or useful for everyone but a game changer for a lot of them. There would be already a plugin for language translation, other currencies, different pricing models (free trial, affiliates, etc). Or some of the functionality Sep requested here (https://www.skool.com/community/6-feature-requests-thatll-6x-group-owner-revenue)

-The simplicity and ease of use of the platform is kept. New plugins have to be approved by the Skool team and follow UI/UX Skool guidelines to keep the feel of the platform consistent. The skool team can focus their efforts on core functionality, while everything else gets outsourced to third party developers. The Plugin store even serves as a testing ground for what features are important and users really want. A plugin that’s widely use can become a core feature later on. This has happened many times with Shopify apps.

Would love to hear everyone thoughts on this.

@Sam Ovens

@Andrew Kirby

@Alex Hormozi

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