Skool is more social than Social Media - Skool News Livestream Highlights

Wendy Wiseman

🔥

15d (edited) • 😺 Skool

Weekly broadcast notes and screenshots from Skool News

Unfortunately I missed the first 10 minutes but I snagged some sensational stuff for you anyhow as well as these notes:

Highlights 😻

🛡️ New Community Safety Tools

* Risk Score: Ongoing signal-based score to identify high-risk users.

* Auto-Mod: Automatically flags problematic content.

* DM Spam Trap: Separates spam in direct messages completely.

* These three tools together form the core moderation toolkit for communities.

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🌟 School of the Week Examples

🎶 Harmony (Bana Nguyen)

Community focused on golden ratio frequencies

$11,111 MRR (yes, very on-brand).

$15/month pricing.
Primary growth channel: **Instagram → School about page**.
Simple funnel: social profile → bio link → join → recurring revenue.

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🧶 Fantasy Makers Guild (Lizzy Townsend)

* Niche: crochet + fantasy fandom*

* $5/month, currently $100 MRR

* Traffic sources:

* Instagram: ~58%

* School network: ~20%

* Example of niche stacking (crochet × fantasy).

* Tip shared: put the **School link first in bio** to increase joins.

* Lizzy actively documents her journey inside School, boosting visibility.

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🪗 Accordion Time (Joachim Monson)

* Community for making real progress as an accordion player.

* Free community

* 61% of traffic from the School network

* Growth driven largely by search and discovery, not a big audience.

* Example of niche discoverability working even without heavy marketing.

* Highlight moment: Joachim played the School News theme on accordion 🎵

📈 Big Platform Takeaways

* Small audiences (even 500–1,000 followers) can build strong communities.

* Many successful communities started with no audience at all

* School’s internal discovery works especially well for:

* Niche interests

* Searchable topics (ukulele, accordion, beekeeping, etc.)

🌐 School vs Traditional Social Media

* School is becoming more social than social media:

* Less passive consumption

* More real interaction

* Many users report replacing social media time with School

* Passion-based communities lead to higher quality interactions and connections.

* Increased time on School → more discovery → stronger communities overall.

📜 Full Transcript

(from when I joined about 10+ minutes into broadcast)

> Yeah, so a little glimpse of the future, and then the full set that we were playing with this this morning. So what does the school cat have in his set? So, basically, he's got a risk score, which will be one of our tools that we continue to update. This looks at many signals and tells you if we think someone's high risk. Auto mod, which is able to flag things for you, and then the spam trap in the DMs, which just totally separates things. So these are the three kind of tools that we think will be very useful for managing your community. Let's go. Very cool.

> Now, school of the week. Schools of the week. Bana Nguyen. This community is really interesting. So Bana Nguyen has a community called Harmony. About golden ratio frequencies. Very cool looking community. And so he is making 11,111 MRR, which is... That's crazy. That's Harmony. But that's got to be a golden ratio. And he's charging 15 bucks a month for his community. He's making 11 grand a month.

> And if we look at how he's getting his members, so basically, yeah, he's got an Instagram profile. He drives traffic to his about page. He gets members. They sign up. And then we can see his Instagram here. And for a lot of people, it's as simple as that. You have a social media profile. You put your school link in your bio. You send them to your about page. They join. And then you can make... Yep. So, very cool to see that community.

> Then, what else have we got? Lizzy Townsend. Yeah, this is a niche community. So, we've seen communities about crocheting. That's very cool. But this is not just a community for crocheting, it's a community for crocheting for people who love fantasy. So, they make like fantasy little crochet figures. Very cool. That's very cute.

> So, yeah, the Fantasy Makers Guild, crochet for fantasy stuff, $5 a month. Yep. And she is making $100 MRR. Yep. And if we see where her members are coming from, she's getting members from Instagram and school. Nice.

> And if we look at her traffic sources, She is, so Instagram is driving 58% of her members, followed by school, which is driving like 20%. Nice. So, you know, school has this kind of tailwind effect where if you drive traffic from off the platform, then school starts to give you members too.

> Yeah. Eventually it would be so cool if it was like you give a member, you get a member. That would be really cool where it's like 50%.

> That link, if you click on that, it's our second link. By the way, for the person that owns this group, you'll get way more people join your group if you make that school link the bio the first one. Just a little tip.

> Yep. She's been making really cool posts in school as well. Lizzie has been making some great posts documenting her journey in schoolers.

> Yep, and it's cool to see things evolve too on the platform because we, it started like we just had some crochet communities. Yeah. But now we're getting these unique combinations, which is like crochet for fantasy. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

> Right, which is like we've had beekeeping communities, and then last week we had spiritual beekeeping. That's true, true.

> So it's like, it's just the natural evolution of things. Once there's one type of things there, it might combine with other types, and both of those types individually are successful categories on Skill. Because we've got a lot of fantasy communities, a lot of crochet ones. Someone created the combination.

> We had beekeeping, we had spirituality. Someone combined them. There's this concept that I came up with that I didn't steal from anyone that's weird works on the internet. Very nice. You're not gonna claim credit for that? Fine, whatever.

> So where am I? And then we have this gentleman called Joachim Monson. So he has a community called Accordion Time, where he basically helps you make real music progress as an accordion player. Yep. And you get a bunch of benefits. It's a free community.

> And how he gets his members, basically 100% school, which is cool to see. These are becoming more common, and it tends to happen when you're doing something unique because people will search for it, right? Like, yeah.

> And yeah, if we look at his traffic sources, we can see that school network is driving 61%. Nice.

> And he, this is a good example because this guy, Joachim, has social and he points traffic to school with his link in bio. He has Instagram, he has YouTube, he has all these things. He makes content, he sends traffic towards his community. But he doesn't have a huge audience, right?

> Yep. It works to get things going a bit. And then the school network is contributing a lot here. Yep.

> But I swear it's most, the communities that tend to work really well with the school network are ones that are like in a niche interest where someone can search for it and they find it.

> Because we have another guy who has a ukulele community and he was shocked because he posted about it nowhere. He didn't market it at all, but he was getting 10, 20 members because people were searching for ukulele. That's cool.

> Yeah. And people, like most people on school have a tiny, tiny audience, if no audience at all. And sometimes a small audience can be really, really, really powerful. You don't need hundreds of thousands of followers. Sometimes a thousand followers, 500 followers can build a really, really strong community.

> I think this is a perfect example of not having a big audience, just starting to do the thing anyway, and it's starting to work. Yeah. And even the people that had a big audience started with no audience, so it's just a part of the progress.

> Yep. And speaking of Joachim and his accordion community, he did a post in schoolers and he played the school news theme on the accordion. So let's check it out.

> Oh, very nice. No, you have to listen to the end. I can't believe you did that. That was the best bit at the end. Oh no. Too late now. Oh.

> Um, so, Joachim, you're the man. We like your community, we like your video. And Insta who?

> So there's a bunch of these posts that are always happening.

> Um, we're starting to notice these things happen more and more. And basically Lindsay is saying, am I the only one who has replaced social media with school? It's just way better here. And there's tons of people saying the same thing.

> And we've noticed this a lot. Like school is starting to replace people's social media diet, basically.

> Yeah. The crazy thing is, now school is more like social media than social media. Because most social media now, you just go on and you consume. You don't interact or engage with any other human. You just sit there and watch other people.

> Whereas on school, you can actually interact. It's actually social. So school is more social than social media now, which is crazy.

> You know, I think there's a lot of people doing interesting things on school. And we start with the passion or the interest, like the accordion or crochet or sacred geometry, right? Like that harmony group we showed you.

> And if you're into any of these strange, like esoteric things, the other people that are into those things, you're probably gonna get along with quite well. And so it's a very different situation than just going on to social media and seeing a bunch of like chaos.

> Um, and yeah, we are starting to notice this. People are spending more and more time on school and it tends to replace their consumption habits on other apps, which is good to see because then that's at the same time, that's also leading to more people discovering communities on Scroll, and that's leading to more good communities getting members.

> Yeah, so very cool to see. So that's basically it for Scroll News today. See you next week. See you.

Replay available soon:

YouTube.com/@skool-news

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