Get respect with a status emoji next to your name. ⭐ Star — top 1% of discovery 🔥 Fire — 30d activity streak 🐐 Goat — highest earner 🥷 Ninja — $300k MRR 💎 Diamond — $100k MRR 👑 Crown — $30k MRR 🚀 Rocket — $10k MRR

Which messenger do you prefer? My preference is currently Signal Because of the invasive spam and Meta practices I choose not to use WhatsApp and limit use of Messenger After trying Voxer a few years back and stopping when it constantly slowed and overheated my phone, I recently tried it again because of my activity in the Skool community BYOB On invited a friend to communicate using Voxer he went on a tirade about privacy and reminded me about Signal, which is the base code without the invasiveness of WhatsApp Voxer has a convenient web portal I was using without my phone for a while Signal’s decision to skip a web-based portal is a deliberate security choice to avoid the specific vulnerabilities that affect platforms like WhatsApp and Voxer. While the convenience of a browser is great, it introduces several "privacy nightmares" that Signal avoids by sticking to standalone apps: 1. The "Code Injection" Risk When you open a website like WhatsApp Web, your browser downloads the application's code from a server every single time you load the page. - The Issue: If a hacker or a government compromises the server, they could send a "poisoned" version of the code to your browser to secretly intercept your messages. - Signal's Fix: Signal’s Desktop and Mobile apps are digitally signed. This means your device verifies that the code hasn't been tampered with before it ever runs. 2. Metadata: The "Who, When, and Where" Even if a message is encrypted, WhatsApp and Voxer still collect a massive amount of "metadata"—the logs of who you talk to, at what time, and from what IP address. - WhatsApp: Owned by Meta, it links this metadata to your Facebook and Instagram profiles for targeted advertising. - Voxer: Collects behavioral data, usage information, and location data, which it may share with third parties as outlined in the Voxer Privacy Policy. - Signal: Uses a technology called Sealed Sender to hide metadata even from its own servers. It only knows when you registered and when you last connected—nothing else.

Matthew Thompson had a chat with Dave Donoghue, a guitar teacher from Ireland who won the Skool Games using LOCAL strategies like: - Putting up posters in his village - Offering a giveaway to his contacts on WhatsApp - And talking to people in real life 😂 In this episode he also talks a lot about the importance of: - Getting super specific on who you serve - Finding "Skool friends" to walk the journey together - And the importance of keeping things simple Check it out :) Subscribe and see more on the @Skool_Stories YouTube channel Timestamp Highlights: 0:00 – $5K/month guitar community (local focus) - Makes $5,000/month teaching guitar on Skool - Audience is mostly local, not global - Built without a massive following 0:21 – First members (simple start) - Joined Skool Feb 2024 after seeing Alex Hormozi content - Added ~10 people manually for free - Pulled from past students + DM responses - Treated it like “a party” and invited people in 1:24 – Origin story (why guitar) - Inspired at age 12 by Sultans of Swing - Got a teacher → wanted to teach others - Ignored traditional career path, stuck with guitar 3:14 – Struggle phase (before Skool) - Tried courses, funnels, multiple platforms - Followed too many strategies → chaos - Skool simplified everything into one place - Community became real-time market research 4:31 – First growth + money - Short-form content (Instagram) → viral post (600K views) - Conversations → some joined - Added YouTube + warm outreach - Free community built trust → converted to paid 5:23 – Breakthrough strategy: LOCAL - Didn’t have huge audience (27K subs vs others with 100K+) - Focused on local town instead of global internet - Key insight: local + online = advantage 7:04 – Offline tactics that worked