After just 4 years of being open to the wider public, Skool scaled to 25 million users, a team of more than 240 people, and a platform valuation of $80 million.
It secured the market leader position without taking a single dollar from institutional venture capital.
To give a quick company overview: Skool is a software platform that aims to make starting an online business as easy as possible by allowing users to create and monetize online communities. However, what makes Skool different from the rest of the software companies is the unconventional (yet still highly methodical) manoeuvres that allowed the company to ascend as fast as it did.
I analyzed 1,000+ of their ads, combed through 18+ hours of video & interviews, and examined 85+ of their launch emails to pick out the biggest and most important needle-movers that played a part in Skool's blistering rise to the top.
(Note: It took a lot of time to research, organize, and distill everything, but it'd be way too ugly to prove how hard I worked by pasting Google Docs and Google Sheets screenshots, so you'll just have to trust me on this one)
In this zero-to-hero series, you'll discover the high-level strategies and decisions behind Skool's rapid ascension that you can then go and model in your own business ventures:
- How the market opportunity that led to Skool's creation was discovered and recognized,
- The strategy that built the launchpad for Skool's success (everything from the first hires to development to partnerships),
- How Skool attracted its first users and methodically snowballed them into bigger and bigger growth, reaching 25 million users by 2026
- Why Skool didn't run any ads for the first 4 years (and why that was a genius move), and
- Why none of its competitors come close to challenging Skool's #1 spot.