We Review Skool The Good, The Bad & The Ugly For 2025
Discover the truth about Skool Pros in our honest review. Explore the advantages and drawbacks before making a decision.
This insightful show delves into the pros and cons of Skool, a popular online learning platform. Our comprehensive review examines its user interface, community engagement, and course offerings while highlighting some drawbacks that users may encounter. If you’re considering Skool for your educational needs or just curious about its features, join us for an in-depth analysis.
The Hosts of The Show are Jonathan Denwood & Nicole Ouellette.
This Week Show’s Sponsors
LifterLMS: LifterLMS
Convesio: Convesio
Omnisend: Omnisend
The Show’s Main Transcript
[00:00:01.430] – Jonathan Denwood
Welcome back, folks, to the Membership Machine Show. This is episode 111. In this episode, we will look at a popular community membership-building platform called School. We’re going to be looking at the good, the bad, and the ugly of this platform that’s getting a lot of traction. I’ve got some interesting things to say about it. I think Nicole has, as well. It should be a fabulous show. Nicole, would you like to introduce yourself to the new listeners and viewers?
[00:01:24.140] – Nicole Ouellette
Sure. My name is Nicole Ouellette, and I sound a little nicer than usual, but I’m here because I don’t call in sick when talking about some of my favorite online people, which we’re getting to in a second. But I have a marketing company. I also have a corporate day job now, and that’s pretty much it. I have two working spaces. If you like any of those things, that’s those things I’m mostly up to. You’re a busy lady.
[00:01:51.830] – Jonathan Denwood
I run two companies, and that’s one too many. But Nicole is a busy lady. But we always have fun with this. Nicole takes it as a bit of a break from the tools of work because we laugh at this show. We usually do this on Wednesdays around 3:30 Pacific Standard, 6:30 Eastern. You can always join us on YouTube at the WP-Tonic YouTube channel. Do you have any questions? We share it on LinkedIn, YouTube and Facebook; you can generally join us on one of those platforms. And we love you to join. Do you have any questions you can ask us during the show? So, like I said, we will discuss school in this episode. And like I say, it’s good points, it’s bad points, and it’s ugly points. But before we go into the meat potatoes of this quick show, I’ve got a message from one of our majors. We will be back in a few moments. Three, two, one. We’re coming back, folks. I also want to point out that we do a fabulous newsletter that shares some excellent information about building a membership website at the beginning of 2025.
[00:03:23.130] – Jonathan Denwood
Plus, we have a list of resources to help you build your membership website and some discounts. What more could you ask for? You can get all these goodies by going over to WP-Tonic. Com/newsletter. Wp-tonic. Com/newsletter. What more could you ask for, my beloved tribe?
[00:03:50.810] – Nicole Ouellette
I can literally think of nothing else I want besides to be able to breathe through my nose again.
[00:03:54.030] – Jonathan Denwood
I wasn’t expecting you to say that, actually. That take really… Right. So let’s go straight So this platform is the buzz of the moment for the past six months, I would say. Got a lot of influences, a lot of people signing up for it and plugging it online. I propose that we talk about the people behind it in a lot more detail in the second half of the show, but we got to mention that two of the biggest… The founder is a guy called Sam Ovens. We got this geezer called Alex Humayze. Humayze, is that how you pronounce it?
[00:04:46.640] – Nicole Ouellette
Hamosi, I think is how he pronounces it. Yeah.
[00:04:48.960] – Jonathan Denwood
Yes, Alex Hamosi, a very well-known influencer, business guru, online. They’re really pushing it, and seemingly, Alex put 200 million into it, supposedly. We’ll be talking about these two individuals and some of it. Hopefully, Nicole won’t die on this. It should be a great show. Nicole, you’ve You signed up for it. I did. What’s your initial impressions you would like to share with the listeners and viewers?
[00:05:40.500] – Nicole Ouellette
Well, one thing I will say is that I had to So just to clarify those listening, it’s spelled skool. Com, right? It’s an online learning platform or whatever. So you go on and you sign up like you would for any website. And the immediate next screen after you put in your username and password as you’re signing up is it says, What’s your credit card number? And you’re like, Whoa. I know it’s a 14-day free trial, but I don’t like to put my credit card.
[00:06:11.940] – Jonathan Denwood
It’s like somebody asks you for a first day, and then when you’re there, it says, When are we going to get married?
[00:06:17.490] – Nicole Ouellette
Yeah, it’s a little like… The thing is, I would understand if you could actually look at the content easily before joining, if you could see the communities listed or something like But there was absolutely no context. So what I did is I stopped, I backed out, and then I forget what I did, but I did a series of steps, and I downloaded the app onto my phone. And then there’s no way to search. By the way, you can have a free school community or you can have a paid school community, but either way you have to pay to be a part of school. So even if you wanted to do a free group, you still have to pay to have a paid membership. So There is no place that lists the communities, so I had to go on Reddit and peruse some posts and find the names of some of them. And then in searching the name of them, I was able to pull up two free ones. So I joined an autistic, ADHD one because, let’s face it, there’s something going on in my brain. And I also joined a health and wellness one.
[00:07:24.820] – Nicole Ouellette
They’re both free. To join them, I think this is clever, and I guess it makes sense. These people are paying $99 a month to have these free groups. To join both of these groups, I had to get my email address, and I had to answer some questions about what I was going to contribute to the community or just a few things, I guess, to show that I was a real person and ready to contribute. They both approved me, even though I uploaded a totally fake picture. In my bio, I wrote, they make you upload a picture, put your full name, and upload a bio. So I uploaded a fake picture. I did use my name, I wrote in the bio. They made me write something.
[00:08:04.450] – Jonathan Denwood
Did I require blood sample?
[00:08:06.570] – Nicole Ouellette
Well, I was just like, Okay, I get it. They’re like, The fact that you have to upload a picture, I think, is a little bit interesting. But anyway, My impressions were that the fact that I had to work that hard to even explore the platform for free made me pause. I will say just now, because as you were talking, it made me think, I pulled up the… Meta has this ads library, and so you can see which ads are running for a particular advertiser. What’s hard is that a lot of these ads are mentioning school, but none of them are run by school. But it seems like there’s 2,200 ads running mentioning the word school in them, and it seems like it’s these different influencers who are selling the platform. So whenever I see a a lot of advertising about something, or whenever I see a lot of influencers pushing something, it always gives me a little bit of pause.
[00:09:09.210] – Jonathan Denwood
We’re going to be talking about this in the second half.
[00:09:13.800] – Nicole Ouellette
Yeah. My impressions were it seemed like a lot of marketing in flash, and it was difficult to just even see what it was about without putting in my credit card number. Like I said, I had to do six steps to even back out of there.
[00:09:27.780] – Jonathan Denwood
What you’re saying is the onboarding experience wasn’t fantastic for you.
[00:09:34.980] – Nicole Ouellette
It felt a little too aggressive for me, but I find- I’m not surprised.
[00:09:42.230] – Jonathan Denwood
Folks, the basics of this are it’s $99 per month, and you can run free or paid communities on the platform. But if you run a non-paying community, you’ve still got to pay $99. If you start off with a free community and then you want to start a paid community or migrate it, you can archive the free community. But I did double check this, folks. You cannot run a free community and a paid community on $99 If you want to run a free community and a paid community at the same time, guess what? You got to spend 99 for each community, which is interesting. But you can run, I think, there’s no limit on communities. But I’m not sure that. I imagine I’m incorrect about that. But the other fact which you mentioned before we went live, Nicole, is that I think one of the surprising things being that this platform was started in 2019. To me, it’s been relaunched over the last year or less. But it’s been around since 2019, is that it’s really lacking some fundamental features. And one of those is it doesn’t host video. You’ve got to find external video hosting platform like Vimeo to host your videos.
[00:11:50.060] – Jonathan Denwood
And the same when it comes to marketing, optimization, and some other key features. Maybe you wanted How can you talk about this because I think you were surprised, was you not?
[00:12:06.410] – Nicole Ouellette
Well, so the whole thing when you look at their marketing is like, this is an all-in-one solution. You go to their page to look at their pricing and they’re like, We have one plan. It’s $99 a month. And you’re like, It’s supposedly straightforward, right? The thing is, when you actually look into it, and it’s funny, I was watching some influencer video who had promo code to join the platform, right? And he was saying, Yeah, this is an all-in-one platform. And literally 20 seconds into the video, he’s like, Well, you’re going to need to have a paid account or something on Zoom if you’re going to do live broadcasting or live sessions and you’re going to need video hosting, and you’re going to need an email marketing platform. And I’m like, okay, you can tell me it’s all in one, all you want. But Those are three big things if you’re going to run an online community. Like I said, if they wanted to say, listen, it’s not about being an all in one solution. We are creating a marketplace of online courses and learners or something. I would understand that. But the fact that they try to sell it as an all-in-one solution is interesting to me.
[00:13:19.110] – Nicole Ouellette
The fact that you have to pay for a membership, I think, to keep being on there, even if you’re just learning stuff. Why wouldn’t I just join if I just want to sit and learn stuff, why wouldn’t I join Coursera that has certified courses from Google and stuff for $49 a month? If I want a marketplace of general courses, that exists. I don’t know who some of these people are, but I just looked in another tab and it looks like there’s a community called Schoolers, and these are people who have their own community groups. It looks like there’s almost 205,000 It seems like you had mentioned it maybe passing almost a million. It seems like less than a quarter of the people on this platform maybe actually own the communities, and maybe a lot of people are there to learn things. I thought that that was interesting.
[00:14:15.820] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, so the onboarding experience, we’ve got some comms, listeners and viewers, but it’s strengths. This is my point of view, and I’d be interested to see what Nico Phil’s thoughts about this, is that it does have a well-rounded interface. It’s plain, but well-thought-out, like I say. Since it was started in 2019, to some extent, I would expect that. But some of the competitors that we’re going to be discussing in the second half of the show have been around a lot more, but they have a lot a lot more features. One of the problems of having a lot of features is you tend to end up with a messy interface. Not always, but as you increase the features that you’re offering, it becomes increasingly more complicated and more difficult to have a easy-to-use interface. It’s just a consequence of feature drift or creep. But it has a good interface, and one of the main things that it pushes, and it’s actually also a key part of its marketing and culture, which we’re going to be talking about is gametisation. It really, really pushes gametisation as one of its core strengths. And also it uses gametisation in the way it markets itself, which I have some qualms about.
[00:16:09.450] – Jonathan Denwood
It uses something which it calls the school games, which basically encourages people that have signed up for the platform for the $99 to make a subscription, membership, stroke community on its platform encourages those that get other members to join their membership, their own competition, which is called school games, and you get points. And if you’re one of the leaders that month, they do have a section on the website where it shows the top courses of that month, but it’s based on how many new members you’ve attracted to the platform to get in top of this area where it lists the most popular. And you get other points, and these points lead to prizes and meetings with Alex or meetings with Sam and all the rest of it, which has it’s no attraction to me at all, but is part of the culture. What I’ve learned is that if, yes, things might not appeal to me, but as a businessman, I’ve got to accept that some things that I don’t like seem to be very popular with the general public. So gametisation has been a big part. Now, gamification around learning, eLearning has been around for a long time, and it was a buzzword about four or five years ago, and it does have its place.
[00:18:16.210] – Jonathan Denwood
Some of the most profitable businesses online are games, basically. It’s a part of the internet that has never appealed to me, but it is an enormous business. And all the techniques that have came from the online gaming industry that are based on psychology do work to some degree, and they were migrated into eLearning, so they definitely have their place. I feel personally that this element of school is over emphasized, but it’s also so part, which we’re going to discuss during this show, part of their marketing and business culture and strategy. What do you think? How would you respond to what I’ve just outlined, Nicole?
[00:19:14.540] – Nicole Ouellette
Yeah, I mean, the other gamified aspect is, at least to me, this is what I understood of it. Again, I’ve only been in these communities for a couple of days, so it’s relatively new, but it seems like there’s also gamification of users. If you and I were in an online community together and I commented more or something, that I would show up on the leaderboard of that and You would get points.
[00:19:46.510] – Jonathan Denwood
Points, Nico.
[00:19:49.270] – Nicole Ouellette
Yeah, like meaningless points. But my problem with incentivizing an interaction to have an interaction is how high quality I see. Sometimes there are these interactions. I’d be really curious if I honestly analyze the genders of the leaderboards and the commenters. I’m wondering, it seems to encourage you talking a lot with me, not having a lot to say. But again, I understand incentivising people to finish something. I just don’t know if a leaderboard is it for somebody like me.
[00:20:29.310] – Jonathan Denwood
I It has its element, but my concern about it is that I think it has an element, but there are other parts of school that gamification won’t overcome some of the key elements of school that I have some concerns about, which I think It’s definitely positioned at the newbie to build in a membership website. It’s really aimed at the person that’s really starting on their journey, and at a price of $99 a month. I think there’s a lot more better valued. But basically, what they’re also trying to combine, and this is my spin on it, is they’re trying to combine elements of UniMe with their own platform because it’s a combination of community and marketplace. And that’s the other key of their marketing strategy to people, is that they say… And it has some elements of Beehive that we discussed a couple of episodes ago, folks, where we were doing a review of the new types of newsletter platforms out there, and both me and Nicole, I’m going to speak for Nicole, but I think I’m right about this, that we both liked Beehive and some of its concepts. And definitely, school is taking some of the concepts of Beehive off discovery.
[00:22:25.140] – Jonathan Denwood
So basically, it’s a marketplace, you’re a newbie, And you’ll be grouped. And I was interested in your first comments, where you were saying that discovery, you didn’t find discovery of other communities on that platform, was it was that easy. I found that quite interesting that you signed up and you didn’t actually find out because their marketing spill is that you got a new community and you’re people will be able to do a search and find other communities, or they’ll be on another community that’s in the round, the same subject, and you will be discovered, and that will help you market your community. I just don’t see it as clear-cut as some of the things that Beevehive was offering.
[00:23:27.340] – Nicole Ouellette
Yeah, well, to be clear, I didn’t finish the signup process. I got to the part… Well, like I said, I did the username, and then I got to the page where it said 14 day free trial, put in your credit card. I was like, No, Alex Harmosy, you already have my email. I backed out. Then what I did is I downloaded app on my phone, logged in on my phone, and it was blank. If I had the name of the group, I could find it. But I think I wasn’t fully onboarded, so I wasn’t brought to the page. To be fair, if you give them your credit card number remember to cancel it if you were going to before the 14 days are up, you might have a more complete onboarding experience. I’m saying that as a casual, as someone who just wants to see what this is about, what it looks like, even if they were like, Hey, all of our communities are gated, but we have these three sample communities for you to look at. Even when you download a WordPress theme, you can at least look at, Okay, this is what the theme looks like with some fake content in it.
[00:24:27.710] – Nicole Ouellette
I just wanted to see what it was about, and I didn’t really see a way to do that without giving the full onboarding. But I found, like I said, if you look up Reddit and you’re like, School communities, and I just started… I even just tried going to the school subreddit and looking around And then basically, it’s just a bunch of people being like, I make five grand a month in school. What’s up? So I ended up just typing in- If I knew it was that easy.
[00:24:58.880] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, exactly.
[00:25:00.170] – Nicole Ouellette
That’s how I ended up finding them without doing the full onboarding. I just really didn’t want to give my credit card. I love you, Jonathan, and I love doing this podcast.
[00:25:08.880] – Jonathan Denwood
I did, actually. Good for you. But it’s on my calendar to After this show, I will be canceling it.
[00:25:17.880] – Nicole Ouellette
Were you shown communities after you gave them your credit card?
[00:25:23.110] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, they were, but the problem is, unlike Beehive, they show various newsletters that are linked around your subject. The problem with school is, yes, you’re going to be shown, but only the people that are getting a lot of other members because it’s part of their business model, which we’re going to be doing.
[00:25:48.250] – Nicole Ouellette
Yeah, a little confirmation bias of.
[00:25:51.080] – Jonathan Denwood
As a person that signed up, that hasn’t got a lot of online influence, hasn’t got a lot unless you’re in a very specific niche. But I think if you’re in a really niche, which I recommend consistently through the show, well before you decided to join as my co-host, Nicar, about finding a niche. So it might work to some extent, but I have my concerns about I don’t think it… But they are definitely, as part of their appeal, are combining elements of existing established community building platforms. Which we’re going to discuss, but you’ve got Discord, you’ve got Facebook groups, you’ve got Slack channels. So they’re trying to provide something that’s reasonably easy to build a community. And I think they are successful in that. It is dependent on your experience of building out something like this. The customization is quite limited, but They want to keep all the… You can change colors, blah, blah, blah, but the layouts are all the same because they want everything to look reasonably coherent because it’s a It’s a platform. When you go to Unime, you don’t have all different styles of courses. They all have to look the same because it’s all on Unime.
[00:27:44.810] – Jonathan Denwood
So if you want to build a brand, you want to build something unique, that’s a bit of a problem, but we’re going to be discussing that in the second half. It’s time for us to go for our middle break. And like I say, in the second half of the show, we’re going to be talking about the founders and the major investor, and also some of the competitors She’ll be a great second half. We will be back in a few moments, folks. Three, two, one. We’re coming back. We’ve had a great first half. But before we go into the second half, I’m going to throw it over to Nico, and she’s going to tell you about her fantastic social media service. It’s a fantastic… Over to you, Nico.
[00:28:42.310] – Nicole Ouellette
Yes, well, so On my various channels, I like to review course directors and things like that. Actually, just last week, I found this woman who is promising to make you super successful on Instagram, and she has 2,000 more followers than I do. I checked out her stats and my stats, and guess what? My videos get the same amount of views as hers get, and they get the same amount of likes and interaction as hers get. What do I have that she doesn’t have? I have a service called Trend to Send. It is a twice weekly text service where you get a trend texted to your phone. No stupid dances, no complicated edits, just something fun on the internet that you can post to your various social media channels and get engagement and interaction without spending hours making videos. If you want to try to do well on social media but don’t have a ton of time but want a little bit of creativity, check out trenddescend. Com. Starts at 49 bucks a month, and you get me in your phone text It’s on Fox twice a week. So check it out, trenddescend. Com.
[00:29:49.490] – Jonathan Denwood
It’s a fabulous service, folks. I highly recommend it, for me. Let’s go on to the business side of this. This is basically as I remarked in the first half of the show, folks, Sam Ovens has a history. He built up a very successful business in selling courses around $2,000 and spending an enormous amount of money on Facebook advertising. He is linked to a lot of people like Russell Burns, Tell Lopes, Tony Robbins, Grant Cardanian. He’s linked to a lot of people like Russell Burns, Tell Lopes, Tony Robbins, Grant Cardanian. He’s linked to a group of people that are not… I have to be very careful what I’m saying here, folks, because these people are notorious in sending letters, and so I’ve got to be very careful here. Just put it this way, they are not my cup of tea. I actually got a funny story, my other podcast, which this is growing every month, Nicole, but my other podcast has been around for eight years, and it is a larger podcast. Actually, Grant wanted to come on it. It was PR people approach me, and I had to diplomatically turn it down because- Good for you.
[00:31:40.570] – Jonathan Denwood
Because I just couldn’t do it, Nicole.
[00:31:42.450] – Nicole Ouellette
Yeah, I don’t blame you.
[00:31:43.520] – Jonathan Denwood
But I know a few people in the WordPress community that are highly successful that really love him. It’s quite amazing. I think when it comes to tell La Paz or Tony Robbins, it My feelings are just the same. So Sam, it’s just not my cup of tea. And Alex, it’s just the same. He grew a business in the fitness in the gym industry selling very expensive consultation packages to gym owners around America. Obviously, this is a very difficult area because there’s always buyer’s remorse, no matter how much you try and satisfy clients. But these were very expensive packages, i. E. 30, 40, 50, $60,000 contracts. And they were contracts that were literally impossible to get out of. Put it this way, I got the feeling that Alex spent more money on legal fees to make sure these contracts were unbreakable than in the actual product that he was selling. But that’s my opinion. And He’s now seeing… So these are the two main investors and founders in school, and basically, they’re just not my cup of tea at all. What’s your own thoughts, Nico? But please be careful in what you say.
[00:33:31.180] – Nicole Ouellette
I will. I have reviewed Ty Lopes, Grant Cardone, and Alex Harbozzi on my channel as well. My issue with any Anybody who tells me how much money they have and spends a lot of time trying to convince me how much money they have and selling me something, I’m like, Well, don’t you have enough money? Why are you trying to sell it to me? Basically, the fact I thought that this product seems to… I’d be curious with the breakdown. Let’s just say this. I would be curious with the breakdown of the budget would be of the marketing budget of this product versus the development budget of this product.
[00:34:14.040] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s my own fault I got to say that I- It feels like a lot of fluff to me because that’s what a lot of these…
[00:34:22.830] – Nicole Ouellette
Just in case you think I’m talking out of my ass, Alex Hormozy, his business advice is for you to… He’s like, Go through your contacts. And he thinks you should be messaging hundreds of people a day until you find somebody who will let you work for free. So you’re a trainer and message, message, message until you find somebody who is going to let you work with them for free in exchange for a testimonial. And it’s just like, A, who has time to send hundreds of messages every single day? And I will say there was a period in In 2019, where I had six different men that I don’t know slide into my DMs and say that as a high performing woman, maybe I wanted to go on a wellness journey, or maybe I want… And I’m like, oh, cool. So you see that I’m overweight and you’re just messaging me because you’re a 20-something-year-old guy, and you think I need to go through a body transformation. So I told all six of those guys exactly what I thought. But at the time, I remember thinking, what? It was maybe around 2019. I was like, what?
[00:35:32.570] – Nicole Ouellette
They feel like all these guys consumed some piece of content because the messages were so similar and they were cold messages. I didn’t know who these people were. I bet these were all for Alex Hormozy students because that is his exact approach, and it was actually used on me. I told them exactly what I thought of that in private messages. Anyway, so my impression is that these guys just seem to spend a lot of time on marketing when they supposedly have a lot of money. I’m like, I don’t know. If I had hundreds of millions of dollars, you know what I’d do? I’d go lay on a beach somewhere. I’m done. I wouldn’t feel like he spent But Tony Robbins has got an island.
[00:36:17.850] – Jonathan Denwood
Good luck to him. But it’s not that he has his own private island in… I don’t think it’s in the Caribbean, I think it’s in Fiji or something. It’s his ways of making that money that I have problems with.
[00:36:34.250] – Nicole Ouellette
Yeah, exactly.
[00:36:36.010] – Jonathan Denwood
Now, there’s another element to this, and I need to explain why I’ve got this opinion. Obviously, I’m not a native of America, folks. I live in America. I’ve been here. You would never realize that. But in the UK, where I was brought up in England, the legal situation is a bit different than America, and I need to explain this so you understand my stance. So multi-layer marketing companies in Britain, in England and Wales, I’m not sure in Scotland, I’m pretty sure it’s the same, are totally illegal. You cannot engage in this type of business set up. If you do, it’s a criminal offense, and it’s not a civil offense, it’s a criminal offense, and there’s a good chance you will go to prison Obviously, if you’re found guilty the first time, you probably won’t go to prison. But if you’re found guilty, well, I say that it depends on the size of the business. But But at some stage, you will go to prison, and you’ll go to prison for quite a long period of time because it’s seen as fraud. Yeah, as it should be. Well, we must make sure… Well, that’s your opinion, isn’t it?
[00:38:16.570] – Nicole Ouellette
That is my opinion.
[00:38:17.640] – Jonathan Denwood
Yes, we got to be very careful.
[00:38:19.790] – Nicole Ouellette
Yes, absolutely.
[00:38:21.130] – Jonathan Denwood
Thank you. Because it’s totally legal in this country, and I struggle with that. But I would also say that I’m pretty… I know a lot of entrepreneurs in the WordPress and also in the bootstrap SaaS world, because I know a couple of people that are personal friends of mine that are big influencers in that world. And any experienced business individual, if you came to them with a investment and it was a a multi-layered marketing-based business model, they would just laugh at you and show you the door. Nobody, I know that’s a serious business person, would invest or have anything to do with these type of set-ups, but they are enormously popular in the US. And SCOR, the core, which is around this gamification and its way of marketing. It is at the core of its business model is multi-layered marketing. I just have an enormous problem with it, go.
[00:39:46.820] – Nicole Ouellette
For those people who don’t understand, because when we think of multi-layered marketing, we think about, I’m selling shampoo and I have an upline who recruited me and the upline recruited me. How does that fit in with how school works? For people who might not be familiar.
[00:40:09.700] – Jonathan Denwood
Because they do have, if you look into the structure, as you get more It is a multi-layer marketing, in my opinion, a pyramid marketing scheme. Your main objective is to attract… You’re selling the courses, but you’re also trying to attempt to get people to sign up into school, and you will get a commission to new people that sign up to build their own resources. It has an element of multi-layer marketing to it.
[00:40:52.910] – Nicole Ouellette
Well, and I’m totally doubles advocating here, but they would say, Well, that’s an affiliate model.
[00:40:57.770] – Jonathan Denwood
Yes, they would. They would. I’m saying it’s my opinion. To me, it has all the hallmarks of a sophisticated, and in my opinion, that’s why Alex invested in it solely. But that’s my opinion. I must stress that my listeners and viewers, that these are only my opinions.
[00:41:29.030] – Nicole Ouellette
Well, and what I I also want to, I guess, stress to the listeners is that go ahead and look up school and school reviews on whatever platform that you like to go on and count how many highly positive reviews versus critical reviews that you’re going to see. Most businesses have a mixture, but if most people are only saying good things about something? Usually, I don’t know, and loud, I should say.
[00:42:06.280] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I want to point out there are videos, YouTube videos, and other online resources that go into the school business model And in my opinion, it’s linkage to multi-layered marketing. And they go into the business model in a lot more detail, but they’re easily found. But obviously, they’re not a sustainability as all the positive reviews around this platform.
[00:42:34.240] – Nicole Ouellette
You can always tell because the review of it has a coupon code for you to try it.
[00:42:41.050] – Jonathan Denwood
Exactly as it would. Let’s look at some of the competitors. I just thought I had to explain the listeners and viewers why I have such a dark and dismal view around multi-layered marketing companies and the business model in general, because it comes from my 40 years, my 42 years in living in the UK, where anybody, anybody in business, and I’ve been in business since I was 21, Anybody, and I had multiple people approach me or ask me advice, and my advice was to run to the hills because it’s totally illegal in the UK. There is no black and gray area in the UK. If you are engaged in these practices, you’re doing something illegal, which is not the case in the US. I want to make it clear to people.
[00:43:45.950] – Nicole Ouellette
Yeah. Absolutely.
[00:43:47.770] – Jonathan Denwood
Let’s go on. What do you see as some of the main competitors to school?
[00:43:54.390] – Nicole Ouellette
The first that actually came to mind is one that I was a participant in it. I didn’t use it as an administrator, but Mighty Networks. Com as a SaaS solution. Basically, the reason that a lot of people look to these platforms, besides the fact that they don’t want to use a Facebook or a LinkedIn group, they want to be able to maybe have learning material. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to organize anything in a Facebook group, but having learning materials and stuff, it’s hard to organize media there, for example.
[00:44:30.270] – Jonathan Denwood
It’s not made for that. It’s not really made for that, is it?
[00:44:33.280] – Nicole Ouellette
Exactly. What happens is people who are like, Oh, I have knowledge, and I want to have things that are easy to search or historically archive. They find that these free platforms are lacking, so they look for their own software solution. Like I said, I’ve used Mighty Networks before. As like I said, I was in a group that used it. It was nice that it was separate from social media. I did like that. I did think that it was easy to use. I didn’t have to pay anything to get on it. It did seem like there was other people on that platform. Like I said, I’m more familiar with it as a user, I guess, but it seems like it does. For example, it It does video hosting even at its lowest level.
[00:45:17.420] – Jonathan Denwood
Yes, it does. The Mighty Networks is one of the main, I would say there’s three main of these community stroke Membership Learning Management System platforms there. Kajabi is one, Mighty Networks, and Circle CEO.
[00:45:39.710] – Nicole Ouellette
I have another one, too, that I just found.
[00:45:43.470] – Jonathan Denwood
They’re the main three. Mighty Networks, it started out as a totally different platform. I forgot its name. It was a social media platform in its early days, and it did get substantial traction. But then Facebook came and it pivoted into a community membership subscription platform. And it’s well established. It does come with a mobile app. It’s not white labeled. Well, it starts around $49, and then the next plan up is… Well, it did, but I think that’s gone up to $99 dollars now. But you do get an app. At school, you do get an app as well. But they’re not white labeled. Both school and my networks on the lower levels of my networks, It has Mighty Networks branding all over it, and you’re quite limited of the customization that you can do on the app. But the fundamental things of push, pull, notifications are available. When you get into one in a fully white-labeled app for Android and iOS, you’re looking between $20,000 to $40,000 with Mighty Networks. One of its criticisms, and I think it does a lot, is the actual interface is now, you can see the age of it to some degree.
[00:47:29.080] – Jonathan Denwood
It’s Obviously, these platforms that are the opposite of school, because one of the criticisms of school is it is aimed at the newbie. There’s nothing wrong with that, but there’s a lot of functionality that’s missing. That’s the total opposite to Mighty Networks, because they do include a lot of functionality. I would say when it comes to marketing and optimization, it isn’t the best, but it does offer a lot of functionality, but they have their own internal language, and some of the UX UI of the front-end is a bit clunky, in my opinion. A more modern interface and a more modern competitor. It also has gamification also. A more modern UX interface UI design is CircleCR So the thing with that is that until recently, it didn’t really have any elements of gamification. I think that’s changed recently in the last six months, and they’ve introduced gametisation to a large extent, I think, as a response to school, because I think one of the players that’s been feeding the heat quite a bit has been and CircleCO with school entering the marketplace. It has got a very nice interface. It does also… One of the problems with Circle is unless you go to the circle pro level, they don’t offer an app, and you have to…
[00:49:22.930] – Jonathan Denwood
The app, I understand, is at a similar pricing level to Network, Mighty Networks, that’s $20, $30, $40, $1,000. On the WordPress side, you’ve got Body Boss. You’ve got Body Boss, the theme, Plug logging, which is about $300 a year. They do offer a app service that works on Android OS. That’s about $2,000 to get it initially set up, depending on the amount of customization you need. Then I think it’s under $200 a month afterwards to actually host the app on my Buddy Boss. At WP Tonic as part of our hosting, we provide the actual theme and plugin, but we don’t provide the app because you can only get that from Buddy Boss. But compared to Circle and my It’s a community network. It’s excellent value, the website plus the app. There are a new player that’s very similar to its functionality that it offers from school in the WordPress place, which we also offer, is something called Fluent Community. They’ve gone public in the last six months. It’s developed by the same people that do Fluent Forms and Fluent CRM, and they are partners with WP, as friends of WP on it, and produce this, and it’s not as powerful as Buddy Boss, but it’s a lot more easier to set up.
[00:51:20.170] – Jonathan Denwood
It’s in that middle ground of school compared to Mighty Networks in the WordPress space. You definitely got some I think you found one or two extra things.
[00:51:33.500] – Nicole Ouellette
Yeah. Well, I found this one called WAP, W-H-O-P. Com. I only found it because as I was reading through all the reddits about school, people were like, I like WAP better. I started looking at it and it does a lot of the things that school seems to do. It has… Hold on, I was just seeing what the payment processing is like.
[00:51:57.890] – Jonathan Denwood
Can you put the link in into the comments?
[00:52:01.100] – Nicole Ouellette
Absolutely, yeah. Actually, this is the actual link I am… It literally goes through WAP versus school. It seems like it’s pretty similar in terms of the fact that you could have courses, you could have forums. I was scrolling to see what their payment processing was like. But basically, it seems to have courses, files, chat, forums, announcements. It seems to have the news feed and all that stuff. I was trying to find if they had an app experience because I know you were mentioning that, and I did not look into whether this one had an app or not. The app thing hadn’t occurred to me, but it seems like an option for sure, and it seems like it’s maybe at a similar or even lower price point. I’m trying to get back to the price point here. It’s a really long scrolling page. But yeah, a lot of people, when I was doing my research, mentioned this as an alternative to school, specifically. I just wanted to shout that out.
[00:53:18.990] – Jonathan Denwood
Where Mighty Networks, it does start at 50. It’s their community plan. That is quite cut down, folks. That’s around just under $50 if you go month to month. The next one up, which is… I’m talking about 90 networks here, is just under 120 a month if you pay month to month. Or It’s just under 100 if it’s around $99. Kajabi do a similar thing. They’ve got a kickstarter plan, which is around, if you go month to month, is 79, but really that is cut down quite a lot. You’d be best to look at the basic plan at Kajabi, which starts 149. Now, Kajabi didn’t really have a lot of community elements to it, but they bought out a startup a year ago, and they’ve been integrating that functionality in there. They’re offering their own community where you got a forum, you’ve got a group section, and you got Push, and they provide an app as well. So they’re all at it. To finish off, what’s your finishing thoughts about school If a friend was coming to you and they were saying, Nicole, I’m thinking of starting a membership stroke community and looking at school, what would you say?
[00:55:00.190] – Nicole Ouellette
I would want to understand whether they had course material that they wanted to present in, not just one course, but if they had multiple courses or learning opportunities, I should say, I would want to know a little bit more about the features they were looking for because they might find that like, Oh, well, I want a central website, and I wanted to email out a digest once a day or something like that. Well, okay, well, school School could do half of that. So there might be just certain things that they’re thinking come with community management that don’t come with school. And I would also… Like I said, it’s just a lot easier to buy software when you know what you want to do. What is the community feed like? Do you want it to be just you or do you want it to be other people posting? Do you want course content? Do you want a place where people can find resources consistently, like some library or something like that? Do you want a forum where people can start their own topics. If you think about how you want it to work, I find a lot easier to pick a software.
[00:56:07.110] – Nicole Ouellette
But like I said, it is tempting when you see ads all over Instagram for it. Look into it for yourself. But if you just want to host a course or you just want to go on a platform and learn some stuff, I think that there might be some other options that might be better suited.
[00:56:22.930] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, that’s my own opinion. I would not recommend it, folks. I think it’s much about nothing. I think the people behind it are expert online marketers, and there’s nothing more than that. But I think the actual substance of the platform compared to more established players is missing many features that you’d be wanting very quickly. I think a lot of its magic is marketing spiel and buzz. But I’m sure they both probably will make a ton of money from this because they are spending some serious money and offering some serious affiliate packages to many influencers. But to be fair to them, that’s what Kajabi did and many other platforms. And the multi-layer marketing, we’ve got to be clear, is legal in this country. Absolutely. Engaging in that type of… There are a lot of businesses that have elements of multi-layered marketing and other components. Some companies are pure MLMs; others are hybrids. I see this as a hybrid scenario, but I don’t like it because of where I come from in the UK. I don’t like it. And I wouldn’t touch the company just for that, but that’s from my background, so it’s my opinion.
[00:58:25.760] – Jonathan Denwood
If I’m looking to build a community, I would personally look at either Circle CEO or the Fluentcommunity on WordPress. If I needed an app, and sometimes people get fixated about needing an app where they haven’t even established their business model, I think they get a bit. If that’s the case, though. You really feel that you need an app for your community to get some traction. I would probably look at my networks, or I would look at Buddy Boss; I would look at those two if I needed an app for me to get the success I was looking for. I think the need for the app; if you don’t, I need an app straight away, as I say, Circle CEO or Fluent Community; if I do need an app, my in-network or Buddy Boss. But I couldn’t recommend Skhool myself. But I do understand why many people would disagree with me; they wouldn’t have problems with the founders, and they wouldn’t have a problem with multi-layered marketing. Because they wouldn’t have a problem with those areas, they would be fine in using school, wouldn’t they?
[01:00:09.380] – Nicole Ouellette
I’ll throw this out there. If you’re listening to this and you’re just dipping your toe in the water, you’re not quite sure and want to use something. Some of these platforms charge a percentage. They don’t charge a monthly fee, but they charge a percentage of your sales. If you’re like, I don’t know if I want to pay 100 bucks a month or I don’t want to pay 50 bucks So this WAP thing charges 30 %.
[01:00:34.320] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I understand where you’re coming from. I think around… I thought we’d better end the show before you guys. But she’s been a trooper. She’s been a trooper. So Nicole, before you die, I’m sorry. What’s the best way for people to find out more about you and what you’re up to?
[01:01:00.220] – Nicole Ouellette
I am technical support, like tech, T-E-C-H-N-I-C-O-L-E, technical support on most social platforms, and technicholesupport. Com. Or technical. Support.
[01:01:17.970] – Jonathan Denwood
There you go. If you want any advice, you can go to the Wp-tonic. On the com website, you can book a free chat with me. If you need any advice on the subjects we covered in this episode, I’ll be more than happy to chat with you. We will be back next week with another. We’ll discuss marketing, some online services or WordPress, and anything that might help you build a thriving membership community in the beginning of 2025. We will be back next week, folks. Bye. Bye. Where’s my…
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