I Canceled Skool After 2,000 Members – Here’s Why
In my video, I walk you through the real story behind Skool and why I ultimately decided to cancel my subscription after running a 2,000+ member free community for nine months. If you’re considering hosting your community on Skool, you need to understand both its origins and the serious challenges that have emerged as the platform has scaled.
I’m sharing my unfiltered experience because I want you to avoid the same mistakes I made when choosing a community platform.
Here’s what I cover in my full breakdown:
The Origins of Skool: Sam Ovens’ Vision
As I explain in my video, Skool was created by Sam Ovens, who was running a massive course business generating over $20 million per year selling courses and consulting. If you’ve been in the online course space, you know just how difficult it is to reach that kind of revenue. Sam started incredibly scrappy—literally hosting his course content on Dropbox and conducting Zoom calls to support his clients as they came in.
Eventually, Sam upgraded to Kajabi and even built his own custom software for course delivery, which honestly looked better than what Skool looks like today for course content (though that custom build took about three years to complete). The real problem Sam faced was how reliant his business became on Facebook communities, particularly for his flagship program called Consulting Accelerator.
According to Sam, the user experience was fragmented and frustrating—students had to visit one platform to watch course content, another place to ask questions, and yet another location to find out when calls were scheduled. He reportedly spent hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of dollars, to build what we now know as Skool: a unified platform where community, calls, and courses exist in one spot, complete with gamification and payment processing built directly into the app.
My Initial Experience with Skool
When Skool first launched, it generated massive excitement in the online course community, and about nine months ago I decided to jump in and create a free community for my YouTube audience. My thinking was that it would serve as a place for my subscribers to connect with each other, help me understand what challenges they were facing, and act as a secondary email list where I could share offers and promotions with my most dedicated followers.
The growth was impressive—we quickly reached over 2,000 members within just a few months. But as the community scaled, serious problems began to emerge that ultimately led me to cancel my subscription. Let me break down the specific issues that made me reconsider the entire platform.
Problem #1: The DM Pitching Epidemic
If you join even a single free Skool group with a substantial member count, it won’t take long before you start getting pitched constantly through direct messages. Unlike other platforms where this mainly happens to influencers and people with large followings, on Skool it’s happening to everyone—it’s become completely ubiquitous.
Now, I understand that this is somewhat out of Skool’s control, and to their credit, they’ve implemented features allowing users to disable DMs from all communities or specific ones. But here’s the catch: when you turn off DMs, you’re essentially cutting yourself off from genuine community interaction, which defeats part of the purpose of joining in the first place.
What really frustrates me is how quickly this pitching culture developed. Because Sam came from the internet marketing community and launched primarily to that audience, the platform that was supposed to provide an awesome, pitch-free experience rapidly became a pitchfest. And it’s not just the DMs themselves—I was getting bombarded with emails about every community I joined, plus an email notification for every single DM I received. The notification configuration became a full-time job in itself.
If you’re only part of one paid group, you probably won’t experience this nightmare. But if you’ve joined multiple groups without meticulously adjusting your notification settings, the email overload is absolutely overwhelming. It’s not fun at all.
Problem #2: Low-Quality “Value Posts” and Spam Comments
The pitching problem extends beyond DMs into the actual community posts themselves. In my free group, I constantly received what I call “value posts”—generic content that people were clearly copy-pasting into multiple groups to see what would stick, often accompanied by follow-up DMs.
What makes this worse on Skool compared to Facebook is that when someone DMs you, the platform explicitly states “you guys know each other from this community,” which makes it feel like the community owner is more responsible for the spam than they would be on Facebook. On Facebook, when you get a random DM, you think “Facebook is annoying.” On Skool, you think “whoever owns this Skool group is annoying and needs to be held accountable” because it tells you exactly which group the person found you through.
The spam got so bad that on my very last post announcing I was shutting down the community, I got comments like “Miss Maria can help you invest in crypto, here’s my WhatsApp, here’s my Telegram.” This isn’t supposed to be like free YouTube videos where bots can infiltrate, but apparently it is now.
My advice if you’re launching a free community on Skool: you absolutely must be insanely on top of moderation—even more so than you would be with a Facebook group. You need to be extremely careful about who you let in, and you must delete and ban problem members immediately when anything goes wrong.
Problem #3: Facebook Groups Are Actually Superior for Free Communities
This might be controversial, but for a free community, especially if you’re in the internet marketing space, I believe Facebook is far superior to Skool. The main reason is simple: so many people are already on Facebook running ads, so it’s much easier for them to access your group, get tagged, see announcements, and engage with promotions on a platform they already check regularly and have an account on.
One of Sam’s main arguments for using Skool is that Facebook has so much noise that people forget about your group. But I’ve experienced the opposite: the Facebook groups I’ve joined tend to show up in my feed frequently, while I actually forget about the Skool groups I join. Sure, I get a million emails from Skool, but once I turn those off, I don’t naturally go check Skool daily like I would with Facebook.
Problem #4: GoHighLevel Is Launching Competing Features
As I mention in my video, GoHighLevel is releasing basically all of Skool’s features this quarter (Q1 2024). Shaun Clark posted some sneak peeks of what’s coming, and I’ll definitely be making a video about it when it launches, but right now, the way GoHighLevel has Community set up already does everything I need.
Here’s what I love: they don’t have DMs, so I can’t get bombarded with annoying pitches all the time. The platform is less “engaging” in some ways, but that’s actually working to my benefit because only quality content gets posted. Obviously, my communities are paid-only, which helps filter out spam, but there’s something to be said for stripping away everything you don’t actually need and just having a place where people can ask and answer questions.
Now, that’s my specific use case for paid communities. If you have a different use case for a free community with heavy gamification, then Skool might still work for you. But if you’re simply looking for a place where people can ask and answer questions, I think GoHighLevel Communities is one of the best options available right now, alongside Facebook Groups.
The Real Reason I Shut Down My Skool Community
Beyond all the platform-specific issues, here’s the truth: running a free community is an enormous amount of work, and it’s just not something I have time for right now. If I didn’t have a YouTube channel and needed a place to gather an audience and promote my offerings while providing value, then yes, I would run a free group—but I’d host it on Facebook, not Skool, for all the reasons I’ve outlined.
Because all three of my communities are paid (my Affiliate Community, The Guild, and my Inner Circle), members are inherently motivated to post questions and engage. I don’t have to force engagement through UI tricks or gamification—they genuinely want support, and that’s incredible. It all lives inside GoHighLevel where I can trigger automations, include it in my current subscription instead of paying an extra $99 per month for Skool, and of course, I avoid all the annoying DMs and generic value posts.
The bottom line is this: I’m already providing tons of value for free here on YouTube. Why not focus on that and then offer escalating levels of paid support for those who want more? If someone joins my Affiliate Community, they get additional support. If they join The Guild, they get personal support from me. And if they join Inner Circle, they literally get my phone number.
Additional Issues with Skool
While we’re on the topic, let me share a few other things I don’t like about Skool. First, you can’t even sell your own Skool community using Skool itself. They don’t have funnels or website builders. Sure, they have payment processing, but you won’t have the flexibility of a landing page builder that you might want in your sales process, which means you need something like GoHighLevel anyway.
I also don’t like that you can’t white label Skool like I can with my current community, which is hosted at community.agency.com and beautifully built on GoHighLevel. It looks like my own brand (though admittedly, I’m still working on the branding). What’s actually nice about this is that members don’t experience the network effect—I don’t want someone to be part of ten other groups on my domain. I want them focused on the one group where they’ll actually get the help they need, rather than getting distracted, which was supposedly the original purpose of Skool in the first place.
Instead, people are joining dozens of Skool groups and getting distracted by millions of notifications and emails—it’s basically turning into expensive Facebook Groups.
What I Actually Like About Skool
To be fair, there are some things Skool does well. It’s actually pretty easy to get discovered in SEO with a well-engaged Skool group since these are public web pages (if you have a public group). I also definitely think they’re onto something with the gamification features, but you have to be truly committed to that entire process—this is a free group with gamification, and here are the rewards you get for participating, etc.
That’s just not my model, but it might be yours. If gamification and network effects are core to your community strategy, I’d probably choose Skool or Facebook Groups over GoHighLevel Communities at this point, because it’s going to take GoHighLevel some time to reach 100% feature parity with what Skool has built.
Final Thoughts on the Skool Hype
I’m not saying Skool is overhyped, but in many ways, I think it is. The platform has real strengths, but it also has serious weaknesses that have emerged as it’s scaled, particularly around spam, moderation burden, and the fragmentation of attention across too many communities.
I hope this helps anyone who’s looking for solutions when it comes to where to host their courses, communities, and member content. If you want even more details, I’ve made another video breaking down platforms like Circle, Kajabi, and other course hosting solutions that you might want to check out for a more comprehensive comparison. You can also join my newsletter for ongoing updates about which platforms I’m recommending, or browse my courses and templates if you want to learn more about building and scaling online communities the right way.
If you’re ready to try GoHighLevel and want access to $8,391 worth of bonuses when you sign up, make sure you’re not using an ad blocker or Chrome extension when you click the link, as it will block affiliate tracking and you won’t receive the bonuses. Check your spam folder if you don’t see the bonus email immediately, and if you still have issues, follow the troubleshooting steps at go.itskeaton.com/ghltroubleshoot.
