I Just Opened a Skool...
A Reflection On Selecting Community Platforms
You will not meet someone more obsessed than I, when it comes to building high quality online community experiences.
I have tried MOST of the platforms out there…
And I’ve deeply investingated nearly all of them.
After my explorations I thought we’d be hosting our community space on Whop, the platform I’ve been experimenting with the past 6 months but…
I believe it’s time to say goodbye to them.
My Whop Experience
I’ve been following them closely for a year and I’ve had around 6 months on and off of iterating my platform there.
I love Whop as a product. They’ve seriously innovated the virtual communnity space and I want to keep making excuses for them but…
I can’t keep deluding myself in to thinking they a will come out on top.
I don’t resonate with the culture of the platform itself, or the way they run they choose to run their company internally.
Complete lack of direction and proper care for the user experience. I could shoot a whole video on this and probably will someday but I’ll summarize…
This video will eventually happen because there many impressive things about the platform I want to publicly document and attach my affiliate to.
They’ve proven over and over that they don’t listen to community feedback but randomly ship things and make changes that no one asked for.
They innovate but they just think that consistently adding new features will make the product better when there is still vast number of things on the platform that are broken, don’t work, or one update breaks existing features.
Hoping for a product that you could just rely on is not something I was able to receive from them. It was just such a headache trying to be optimistic.
The biggest reason why I’ve decided to not use them though…
I wouldn’t trust that those that download Whop because of me would be safe.
There are just too many bad players on that platform, if they were to go out and explore other communities on their own they’d probably get scammed.
I don’t want my brand ends up being associated to with something awful happening to someone so I won’t host my space in a place where that is more likely to happen.
Sure scams *could* happen on Skool but the simplicity, reliability, and vitality (how active people are on there) just points to the idea that this is a place where the platform doesn’t get in the way and people will play.
Invites Coming Soon
I won’t be dropping the link to my new Skool today I need a few housekeeping things in place before I feel comfortable funneling tribe into there but I will use the rest of this post to share some of the reasons why I’ve chosen skool after trying so many platforms.
I had a pretty well polished discord community I was building but I’m putting that on pause right now to prioritize the public facing portions of my community. The invite-only Dharma Dojo is not ready just yet.
Feel free to comment if you’d like access to it early
Why Skool
Simplicity & Calendar Integration Is One of the Most Intuitive Way to Upsell via Sincere & Regular Community Connection.
These Calendar Events Can Be Paywalled So that Everyone Can View Them But Only People With Access to A Specific Course or “Class” Can Click The Event Links.
$10 plan makes the subscription significantly more affordable
If you don’t want to pay their 10% transaction fees you can process the payment externally and use zapier to zap access to specific products
Their courses and forums support Loom video embeds (You’d be surprised how many platforms don’t for some reason)
This just means is that it makes it extremely easy to iterateand produce your educational content
People are very active here. Which is a pro and a con.
Pro is that people will keep coming back to visit other communities and there’s a solid chance they can visit yours
Not as much friction because your members have probably already created a skool account
It’s con where it’s quite a bit of work to maintain, especially when other communities can be a lot more noisy than a solo-creator’s level of output
Forums are very user friendly and much easier to navigate.
This format really does serve the modern day polymath so you can make regular and short written entries each time you explore a certain topic and it’s easy for your community to find.
I realized It would feel weird putting technology updates, or specific news about digital tools on the substack because it would dilute the main themes of “Mentor Synthesis Posts or Flow Creators Podcast EP being found on my Substack “Website”
Gamification I’m not a huge fan of but it enables your diehard members to get great incentives so it’s definitely a pro.
Free Community Posts can be FULLY open and public.
This is a big deal because platforms like whop and others they have to have a whop account to view posts and be a fly on the wall.
I’m all about ungatekeeping here.
My Creator Funnel
I feel called to share my full community tool stack because I’ve spent the majority of the past two years deeply investigating my solo-creator systems.
Substack
The best social media platform. Full of creatives and deep thinkers. I’d like to make this my personal website to streamline my distribution network. Multiple Podcasts, Newsletters, and topics hosted neatly in one place with a fully integrated social sharing ecosystem is a place I could see myself producing on long term.
Skool
Yeah we talked about this. Coming soon. I really do like this in tandem with substack because If I have virtual events coming up I can distribute an email from substack & skool at different times in case someone didn’t see the first.
I know I’ve missed a lot of events because I just tune out skool notifications in my email because I get so many of them
Polar
A Powerful & Beautiful Stripe Wrapper for Non-Developers That Will Actually Deliver Your Products and Give the end User a Beautful Checkout Experience
Includes a dashboard that will let users sign in to view all the products they’ve purchased from you.
They are like 1% more expensive than stripe but you can actually effectively serve your community the products and resources they’ve purchased.
LemonSqueezy
I may use this if I need a united storfront for digital products was thinking of utilizing this for a shop specifically for “Mentor Synthesis” related products.
Beacons + Carrd
Free Link in Bio + DM Automation Platform and I’ve embedded my Beacons into a Carrd Site so I could embed my substack signup into it + add a custom domain using carrd.
Will probably be making a paid letter exploring this process + my favorite website building process, resources, & templates using Carrd/Beacons
Trial Period
My trial ends on October 30th if all things go well and I like what I’m able to put build on Skool we should be staying over there so I’ll be keeping you in the loop.
Thanks for tuning in
— Dan ㊥
I’m in