5-6 years ago, the Vegan Gym started building communities on Facebook. Today they are running 8 separate communities on Skool, and they cap each one at 100 members. I recently talked with Daphne Bascom, their COO, and she shared how this academy model works and why they made the switch to Skool. It's pretty interesting. Why Cap at 100 Members? Most community builders think about scale as just adding more members to one community. The Vegan Gym does it differently. "We try and keep our communities around 100 clients so that our coach to client ratio is about one to 20, one to 25, so that we can maintain those close connections," Daphne explained. When a community reaches 100 members, they do not keep growing it. They launch a new one. That decision comes from what they have learned works. Daphne told me that "100 size is about a sweet spot that we've identified in terms of coaching, client, community closeness." This approach to community size management helps maintain engagement rates and member satisfaction while scaling operations. How the Academy Model Works Here's their community structure: • 1 parent community (Vegan Superhero Academy HQ) • 8 child communities with names like Avengers, Guardians, Legends, and Titans • About 100 members in each child community • 4-5 coaches per community • 16 total coaches across all communities Each community receives twice-weekly group calls, one-on-one coaching sessions with assigned coaches, and weekly masterclasses delivered by their coaching team. Daphne mentioned they practice what they call "unreasonable hospitality" in each community. The smaller community size makes that personalized approach possible. As she put it: "I feel like I know everyone in that community." This model represents horizontal scaling rather than vertical scaling—instead of growing one large community, they create multiple smaller communities as they expand. Why They Moved from Facebook to Skool The Vegan Gym transitioned their communities from Facebook to Skool after consistent feedback from their community members.

There is a lot of talk about challenges these days. Personally, I'm in the middle of building a free 7-day challenge for my other community Edit City. Anyone else doing this? Any tips?