I Replaced Skool and Built This Instead

A founder explains why they left Skool to build ScalersOS, a platform for coaching businesses with tiered community feeds, an AI agent that handles support 24/7, course management, and affiliate tools. Owning the platform means keeping your data and full control over branding, while the AI reduces support work and community interactions feed new content.
Chapters
So I replaced my school and built my own community platform instead for a few reasons. Number one is because right now every coaching community on the internet looks exactly the same. You have the same layout, the same single feed, the same school branding, and mine included. So I canceled my subscription and built my own platform that you are seeing right now. I have AI agents that can answer questions 24/7. I have multiple community feeds. I have a course system. I have an affiliate program and a client acquisition funnel that runs itself. So all I have to do is get people into the community and we have something called product-led growth instead of sales-led growth. So product-led growth means that people keep paying for the tool that you have built. So for example, Google Drive. You sign up for free for Google Drive, you have some storage for free, and then if you want to keep using it more, you need to pay and, um, so on and so forth. So instead of having a sales call to close clients on your products, now you get clients for free or prospects for free, and they automatically upgrade to your paid program. So today I'm going to walk you through exactly what I've built, why I've built it, and the one framework that made it all work. And if you run a coaching business and you're paying for someone else's platform, this might change all you think and rethink your entire business model. So I'll just give you a quick tour of the platform. So right now we have the community. We have, uh, people can post in here. It's exactly like in, in school. You can put videos, you can put like really whatever you want. Um, and the good thing is— oops. The good thing is that I have multiple feeds. So I have a free community, I have the pro community, and I have the inner circle community. Okay. So each tier can have its own community feed. And I'm actually changing a lot of this to be like a product of my own instead of like Modeling School. And I have like the community, the course, and the AI agents in one place so that this way when I go to the course and I ask people to do something, for example, like creating like their course platform or whatever, I can have an AI agent that people talk to in here where they can ask questions based on the specific course we are working on. Okay. So we will have the course, the agent, and the community aspect all in one. Eventually, that's what I want to build here. Okay. So if we go back to this lesson, and as you can see, like all of this was, um, done by AI and I put it all in my community. So I have API access so I can send whatever I want. And now all I have to do is just record the video and go through the bullet points. Okay. So why I was on Skool is because it seemed obvious, like Omoz backed it. Everyone was using it. It was $99 a month, which was affordable. And the setup was simple, decent engagement compared to Facebook groups. Uh, and the gamification got people posting. But building a real community, having paid members, it was all working. But the more I scaled, the more I hit a wall. It's like you're renting an apartment and you want to pull down, knock down a wall, but you can't because it's not yours. So this is the problem and many problems with that at scale. So one feed for everything. So you can have your free members, your paid members, your course questions, wins, everything was mixed in one feed. And at scale is complete chaos and important posts get buried and like you can't really figure out what was important and what's not. Okay, so it's like basically your community becomes your support, support feed and I really don't like that. And talking to a bunch of people, I realized a lot of people don't even log into Skool anymore because it's always the same thing. People ask the same question and it's just— Yeah. Like what was supposed to be a good community, it's now like a support system. You have absolutely no AI and no automation in Skool. So you ask the same question, people ask the same question over and over, and you have to respond to them manually or pay someone to do it. Zero customization, no custom domain, no custom colors or fonts, and like all the communities look the same. Um, you have no— No. Client acquisition funnel, no upsell path, no automated progression. You duct tape tools together. They have no integration except Zapier, which sucks. And I canceled my subscription. So that was another point of friction. And you don't own anything. You don't own any of the data. So don't worry about this. And basically the most successful school communities right now, they teach people how to make money on Skool and basically get more people to use Skool and like grow Skool for them basically. So that's how it works. So I could have switched to another platform like Circle, Mighty Networks, Kajabi, but the problem is the same. You're still renting your data. You have a different landlord, but the same lease. So really what made me want to build my own platform is because I own everything. Mm-hmm. And this way I can have product-led growth, which grows companies 2 times faster., with 30% higher valuations. Okay. So what if the platform is what converts free to paid? So that requires only owning the platform and not renting the platform. Okay. So you can build product-led growth on school. So that's why I built ScalersOS. So this is how it works. People join for free. They have access to the community, AI chatbot, the, some courses. Then they can upgrade to Pro, which is $100 a month, and everything is done in the community, like one platform for everything. So Pro get the full courses, deeper community, priority AI, you get, you have more, less limits with the AI, you can connect to any tools that you want. Inner Circle, this is where we have live weekly coaching sessions, accountability, advanced systems. Yeah. And then I have my Done For You AI agency where I get people in here, um, as well. So building this thing, there are 6 things you cannot do in school that I can do with this platform. So I can have multiple community feed, not just one feed, but dedicated feeds for each, uh, level. So if I go to the community here, this is the free one. We have the pro one and we have the inner circle one that are all separate. Okay. Okay. So this is how it works. And then we have, um, AI chatbot agents. Let me just open this in a new tab so I can always come back here. So we have AI chatbot agents. So here you can chat with the agents. We have different agents, general, offer advisor, growth advisor, cold email builder, and I'm building more and more as I build new courses. With the agent. So what I really want to do is to merge everything into one and have a course, an agent that helps my clients execute on the work, and a community aspect specific to that course. So this way we provide transformation, not just information. Each course has a specific task to it. We just don't teach people to think better or things like that. We help them take action. Okay. And if they have any questions, then the questions are specific to the course that we are on. Okay. In addition to that, the chat and the AI agents can connect to any of your business tools that you are using. So we can connect to your Gmail, we can connect to Google Calendar, whatever platform, Airtable, Notion, ActiveCampaign, HighLevel, whatever you are using, Asana. Asana. And you can ask the AI to do things for you on this platform. So this is agentic AI, meaning the AI can take actions on your behalf based on what you are asking it to do. Okay. So this is the AI agents. So now it can answer client question. And we also have like a chat where people can ask questions and they Basically everything is trained because I own the platform. Every new video that I record is transcribed and added to the knowledge base. So now every AI agent can answer questions based on the course that I've recorded and all the training materials from all the courses. Okay. Um, so now really the, the AI is doing all the, the, the technical support and and answering any questions that clients might have. We have a full course system. So right now we are recording this in a course. And I basically have here my, uh, Claude Code Masterclass, basically showing you how to set up Claude Code on your computer, connect it to every tool that you use, and, um, literally have unlimited power, um, in your computer. Then every time I record a new video, I can have the lesson added here. This is what I'm recording on. And then I have add the lesson in here. So I can just edit, put the video, and now the full thing is complete. Okay. I have an affiliate program. So every, for every person who joins, they get a referral link to get people into the community. They can get people to upgrade to the Pro or to the Inner Circle in here, and they get commissions automatically. I've built this with Stripe Connect, which I believe is what School is using for payments as well, but I own everything, I manage everything, and all the data is mine. Okay. So my affiliates are rewarded for bringing coaching clients and not referring people to School communities. Content ideas from community questions. So AI monitors questions and surfaces content ideas. I have a full admin section where I have and manage all of my content. Okay. And for every new client question that is being asked, I can have a new, um, IDs for content that can be recorded for my social media, for YouTube, whatever I want. So that's the benefit of literally owning all the data. So now the community questions, the course, the everything is my own data. I can do whatever I want with it. Okay. Um, so every question becomes potential YouTube video, email, course module, and your community literally tells you what to make content about. And finally, we have an automated client acquisition funnel. So everyone goes from the free version, then upgrade to the pro, then to the inner circle, and eventually become a Done For You Agency client where I can build this kind of systems for them. So each upgrade happens inside the platform. We don't have any external sales page. Everyone goes to the same place, which is the free community, and then they upgrade. Yeah. I actually have external pages to get people directly in here by paid option, but generally this is what we want to happen. So on Skool, you had to manually DM and pitch people, and here the free experience is so good that upgrading is obvious. This is product-led growth. People want more of what you've already built. Okay. So right now, instead of taking 10 hours a week for Support, it's done automatically. AI handles it 80%, and I just need to do 2 hours a week of support instead of 10 hours a week. Client experience, like everything feels chaotic. If you want to add AI agents to your school community, you need to have like 2 different platforms. It's very not well organized. And now with my own platform, the clients have instant answers, the feed is organized, the— we have a real course system and everything is plugged in together. So what I'm doing now, instead of having like the community, the course, and the chat, I want to have like one platform, one page where we have everything. So we have the lesson, then we have the agent to work with the lesson, and then we have the community aspect where people can ask questions specifically to that course. So this way it's— we provide transformation again, not trans— not information. Content, guessing what you made now, the community question feed the YouTube calendar. Ownership, I control everything, the domain, the branding, full data control. So I own all the data, literally. Okay. All the clients, all the questions, everything is in my own database, and I can use this data the way I want. Acquisition: the free tier converts to paid without any sales calls. So I don't want to do any sales calls. My time is very valuable to me, and now everyone goes to the free and upgrade at their own pace. So that's again the product-led growth. So I went from running a coaching business on a platform to running a coaching business that is the platform. So this is why I've built this entire thing. So I'm not telling you all of this to go and build your own platform from scratch. That's my job. That's what I do at scalers.io. But I'm telling you this so that you don't have to accept the limitation of whatever platform you are on. You don't have to settle for one community feed, zero AI, and a school page that looks like every other school page on the internet. Scalers OS is what I built for my business and it's what I'm building for yours. The free tier gives you access to the community, the AI agents and the system I showed you today. No credit card, no sales call. You just go and use it and see if it's better than what you actually have. And if you want me to send you the direct link, you can comment scale below or you just go to scalers.io with a K, S-K-A-L-E-R-S. Lers.io and you will get instant access to the platform. And if you are the type of coaching business that wants something built for you like this and managed for you, this is what my AI agency is doing. This is kind of like showing you the kind of systems we can build for you. This is the kind of system we build for clients. And if you want to see how I build the AI prospecting systems that finds clients while I sleep, watch the next video, and I will see you there. Peace.
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