BOY OH BOY I've been thinking a lot about the conversation Martin started yesterday after our chat! BASICALLY, WE HAVE TWO OPTIONS: 1️⃣ FUNNEL-First Community = the community exists as a funnel, plain and simple 2️⃣ COMMUNITY-First Community = community is there for us to connect, even if it is also part of a business ecosystem which has paid offers. STAY WITH ME HERE on the incoming analogy... This got me thinking about how my daughter is 14, and now we have to teach her to be wary of boys. For some reason, when teenage boys' hormones get crazy, they're not always thinking of the girl and her brains and jokes and HER AS A PERSON. "NOTCH ON THE BELT" feels - honestly? GROSS - like there is the conquistador and then the conquest - as though one person is essentially there just to be used and tossed FUNNEL-FIRST COMMUNITIES = - feel much the same - like members are conquests - members are used like we're a cash machine to pull money out of And yeah, it's truly just like being another notch on the belt so the hustle bros* can brag about the $$$ from the launch. *QUICK NOTE about "hustle bros" --> I know this a gender-heavy marketing conversation. MEANWHILE... IN THIS ROOM, there are actual *GENTLEMEN*, so I want to take a moment to acknowledge that women can also show up as "hustle bros" and that men are often insanely thoughtful and gentlemanly in terms of the way they show up in life and business. This is not about man vs. woman. This is about the FEELING of being used or a conquest vs. the FEELING of being honored as a human. LET'S BRING THIS BABY HOME: In a community-first community where there are offers in place, there's no feeling of "notches on the belt" (which is obviously gross as a side note, but I make this analogy because I think we need to know that certain ways of showing up in relationships of ANY KIND feel genuinely... gross!). ➡️➡️➡️ YOUR THOUGHTS ON THIS ONE?!

Skool's big goal for this year is making Discovery better and therefore helping us to get FREE automatic traffic to our communities. Skool is so very cool! This post is a recap of what was covered in this week's Skool News, but you can also check out the recording in the attached video. YEAR THEMES: - 2024 -- Hormozi partnership and Skool Games, crazy growth - 2025 -- 10x better, 11x cheaper. Aimed to make it so you could do EVERYTHING you needed to do with your business (native video, tiers, everythinggg) - 2026 -- Discovery! Members! Growth! Making many improvements to Discovery, traffic, search results, etc. AND great analytics so you know where your members are coming from! "Do you guys want that? Do you want more members?" Funny Q from Andrew Kirby, officially the Head of Mullets @Skool WHY ARE WE HEREEE?! - Bringing people together around our passion - Turning out hobby/passion into a full-time income - Skool's mission is to help 1 billion people find community THE BIG PICTURE! Traffic --> Community --> Members --> Income - Most groups start free, then eventually you monetize that gives you MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue). If you know your monthly costs and how much your job pays, then a cool goal is to get the community to cover and pay that. EXAMPLES! - Nate Herk (see the incoming screenshot on this). YouTube w/ Skool link --> free Skool --> paid Skool --> right now $238k/month. "I think it's safe to say he IS full-time" ~Sam 😅. 63% of his traffic is from SKOOL, not from YouTube! WOW! - Kim Thompson-Pinder (screenshot). Circular Machine Knitting Addi group. It's a free (well, freemium!) group. - David Mincey (screenshot) has a metal detecting community! YouTube to Skool. 37% of traffic is from Skool! - Gillian Berry (screenshot) with her raw vegan community. She has an IG ("What's this thing called? Instagram?" ~Sam) and YouTube. YouTube is sending the most traffic, but Skool is too! $5,200 MRR REMEMBER: All the big groups started as small groups! Build a community around passion, drive traffic to it, get members, and monetize it.

When you're in a community that you don't set the "rules", and someone responds with a straight up AI comment, how do you respond? (We're talking, no human to be found...) My personal challenge with this mix is that: 1/ it's crystal clear when it's AI 2/ I didn't start a conversation with ChatGPT 3/ there's a human who stuck the comment there 4/ I don't want to be rude to the human 5/ but it feels just really messed up that the human isn't there in the comment This is especially weird when I've seen the same human around, with actual human comments. I'm 🤖 navigating this 🤖 journey that's 🤖 unfolding while 🤖 cultivating real AF 🤖 lived experience and an 🤖 evolving tapestry with... Let's be honest here. I'm sitting here with almost zero patience for how weird AF it feels when the comments sound like that but worse because they weren't written by a human making fun of the ridiculousness that humanity is dealing with. They are shared by a human who didn't show up for the conversation, and yet I still want to be thoughtful toward the human... who is in there SOMEWHERE. [this was originally posted in Connect & Collab. With 172 comments, this conversation was LIT! 🔥]