The next few weeks are going to be about monetization, and monetization needs traffic. Growth Boost might help in the short term, but what you really need is sustainable traffic that doesn't cost you 30% in referral fees. So we're launching a YouTube channel in the next few days, and you can follow the whole journey with us. I've been digging into research with vidIQ, but before we go further, we want your input. Why bother researching something as small as a channel name? Here's why: in the Skool growth space right now, men run 11 of the top 12 channels. That's going to shape how we approach this. The big question for you: what kind of content would you actually enjoy watching? Donna and I already disagree on what the first video should be. Maybe we'll just argue in every video? Comment Team Todd or Team Donna and you might just settle it. Team Donna, the Heart position People do not subscribe to information, they subscribe to people. There are thousands of videos explaining how to grow a Skool community and most of them are interchangeable. What is not interchangeable is why two people decided to build this together and what it cost them to do it. That story is the only thing on the channel nobody else can copy. Lead with it and the people who stay are the ones who actually belong here, not the ones who came for a tip and left. You are not trying to reach everyone. You are trying to find your people, and your people recognize themselves in your story. Team Todd, the Data position Your first video teaches YouTube who to show the channel to. Origin story videos on new channels get watched by people who already know you, which tells the algorithm to keep showing you to people who already know you. That ceiling is low and hard to break later. Search volume tells a different story: nobody is typing "why did they start Skoolology" into YouTube, but plenty of people are typing versions of "why is my Skool community dead." Answer the question people are already asking, earn the impressions, then tell the story to an audience that exists.

Notes from the July 30 mastermind call This came out of a paid Premium mastermind call on Growth Boost and where communities are heading. We share the substance of some calls with everyone here rather than keeping it behind the paywall. Not every community works that way, and there is a reasonable argument for the other approach. Our view is that if something material has changed on the platform, you should know about it whether or not you are paying us. So here are the parts that matter, whatever level you are at. Retention now matters more than engagement This is the biggest shift, and most owners have not adjusted to it yet. Skool has introduced the beginnings of an efficiency score that determines which communities get pushed through Growth Boost advertising. Historically the scoring leaned on engagement. Going forward, retention carries considerably more weight. Sam has said retention needs to be above eighty percent. Aiming above ninety gives you cushion. But do not conclude that engagement stopped mattering. It simply matters for a different reason now. Retention is what matters to Skool. Return on Investment matters to Skool. Engagement is what matters to you. People who never participate almost never upgrade to a paid tier. So engagement is not about a busy feed, it is about producing members who eventually want the next thing you offer. One practical warning that follows from this. Be careful about removing inactive members. Some owners have cleared out people who had not posted in a while. If retention is now scored, that may work against you. And here is the part nobody has a confident answer to yet. What do you do about members who have never participated, or accounts you suspect may not even be real people? Removing them cleans up your community and may damage the score that decides whether you get advertised. Keeping them protects the score and leaves dead weight in your feed. There is a real argument on both sides and the honest position is that it is not settled. Whatever you do, decide it deliberately rather than on instinct.

Let's close the week gently, thinking about your own community, and a reframe that took me a while to believe. Generosity and sustainability are not opposites. They're partners. The most generous thing you can do is build something that lasts, because a community that survives keeps giving long after the free-forever version would have burned out and closed. Charging fairly isn't the opposite of caring. Sometimes it's how the caring gets to continue. What would shift for you if you saw earning a living from your work as an act of generosity toward its future, not a retreat from it?

A gentle one for the middle of the week, and as always, this is about your community, not this one. There's a subtle shift that changes everything, and it's not tactical, it's internal. It's the move from "am I allowed to charge for this?" to "my work has real value." Notice those are completely different questions. The first asks permission from some invisible judge. That judge is usually made of old voices, a message you picked up somewhere that helpers shouldn't profit, or that wanting to be paid is somehow greedy. Not truth. Just an old echo. The second question isn't a question at all. It's simply true. And you don't need anyone's permission for something that's true. The value you create is real whether or not you've fully made peace with being paid for it. Your discomfort doesn't shrink your worth. It just means the worth arrived before the peace did. So, sit with this today... Where are you still asking permission for something you could simply recognize as real?

This week we've been sitting with a big idea.💡 Real value comes first, and everything else, including the money, follows from it. This morning was the inner side of that. Today, just a simple heads-up. You all know Growth Boost, Todd's talked about it plenty, and it's making the rounds on Skool. There were some updates to it just yesterday, and rather than try to unpack all of that in a post, Todd's going to host a session on it this Thursday at 11:00 Central. He'll walk through what changed, how it actually works now, and how to think about whether it fits the kind of community you're building. Here's how we'll always handle things like this. No cheerleading, no fear-mongering. Just the facts, laid out honestly, so you can decide for yourself what's right for you and your community. We'd rather be a source you can trust than one that's trying to sell you on something. And a quick note on how things work around here, because I want to make sure this is clear. This free space, right here, is our Research Lab, the discovery space. It's where we think things through, notice what's working, and figure out what we're building. That's open to everyone, always, and everything we learn gets shared right here. When you're ready to actually roll up your sleeves and implement, there's the Build Room. That's our Premium space, where we do the work together, live and hands-on. Thursday's Growth Boost session is a Build Room session, so it's for our Premium members. But as always, whatever's worth learning from it comes back here to the Research Lab for everyone. Different stages, different needs, and you're never on the outside of the ideas. So if Growth Boost is on your radar and you're Premium, we'll see you in the Build Room Thursday at 11:00 Central. And if it's not your thing right now, no worries at all, we'll be right back here with more next week.