Ho ho ho. Merry Christmas. >> Hello and welcome to School News Christmas edition. Yes. So, today we're going to do something a little different. We're going to uh go over some of the highlights from this year and we're going to also go over some of the big features we shipped this year and tell you a little bit about our plan for next year. It should be a fun episode. So highlights. Well, you know, school grew a lot this year. Here's a chart from like our growth. >> This is a real chart. >> So, you know, 2024 was a good year. 2025, we're figuring out our new approach and then when it worked, it like really worked. Um, and it's been growing like crazy. So, you know, we've got 20 million users now and growing by like more than a million users every month. >> Crazy. >> Um, 200,000 communities are now on school and more than a billion in earnings. So, you know, school is growing a lot, which is good news. Um, and 30% of memberships come from the school network itself. Yeah, >> this is a crazy crazy stat. >> Yep. >> Like we this stat surprised us and it surprises everyone else too which is crazy. >> It means if the average group has 100 members, 70 came from somewhere else and 30 came from school. >> Yeah, >> it's a lot. >> And it seems to be growing. >> Yeah. >> Um and churn continues to decrease for everyone. So this is global churn for like everyone on the platform uh for memberships. Y >> and you can see like this is a two-year chart. It started high around 30%. And we've been doing many things like optimizing the platform to bring churn down. And also all of you guys with your communities, you've been doing things to optimize churn and bring it down. And you know we're at about 15% now which is awesome. At the start of this year, we were at like where is that? That line is like it's a bit over 20% at the start of the year. >> Now we're down at 15 and this month might be even a lot lower. >> Nice. >> So, this is good. >> Yeah. It means members that pay you will keep paying you for longer because of changes we've made to the platform. >> Yeah. And changes they're making, too. It's a team effort. >> Yep. >> Uh we also had the first group uh to hit 500 grand a month in MR. >> Yeah. Shout out to Spencer. And he's growing as well. He's at like 540. >> Yeah. So, if you go to the leaderboards, you can see here in the money category, Spencer with his community evolve, he's making $540,000 a month, which is awesome. You know, that's like 6 point something mil a year. Um, and he's got good retention, low churn, all of that. Uh so you know not only is school growing and more members are coming from the network churn's going down but the people on school are starting to earn more and more which is good to see. >> Um what else? Best post of the year award. This post was a banger >> by Nick Sarrive. He won the school games with a 300 grand a month oneman school. >> Yeah. with 95% profit margins. >> Yep. And then he did this full post here breaking down exactly how he does it. Um and this post is he also included a video, you know, and there was 4 and a half thousand likes and almost that's a lot of comments. 5.5,000 comments. >> Yeah. >> And if you haven't seen this one already, it's I think it's probably the best post of all time on >> school, I would say. post. >> So, you know, people are earning more, people are posting better stuff, too. Um, and honestly, my favorite part about what's happened this year is that school has literally expanded to be for like everything. >> So, I'll show you some examples. Like, this is a witchcraft university. So, there's a lot of school communities that are that are about witchcraft and wizardry and stuff like that. This is about donkey hoof trimming. It shows, you know, like she shows you how to trim your your donkey's hooves. It's 49 a month and she's got 160 members. >> Crazy. >> And she only started about a month ago. >> Amazing. >> Yeah. There's the flock, which is a bird watching community. >> Yeah. They do meetups around the world to look at birds. >> Yeah. It's 15 bucks a month. There's 120 members. Jail support. This is like for people that are in jail, not for them, but I think for the for the families and things. >> Yep. >> Um a murder mystery group. >> And this guy shows you how to do metal detection. You know those people that walk around on the beach with like those things? >> Yeah. >> Um this guy shows you how to live in a shipping container home. Pig farming made simple, right? And this guy is a famous skier and he shows you how to ski better. >> Yeah, it's crazy. >> 67 bucks, 193 members. >> There's literally a school for everything. >> Yeah. And this inside this community, it's pretty cool. like this pro skier. People upload a video of them skiing and he breaks it down frame by frame and tells them how to improve their >> their style basically. >> That's cool. >> Um yeah, he asked for this this feature where he could skip a single frame in the video and we we gave it to him. >> Um yeah, so he can do frame by frame analysis using native videos on school. >> Nice. And you know, we've got like honestly everything on school now from, you know, there's big businesses on school making half a mill a month or more. Famous people like Tom Aspenol, he's the UFC heavyweight champion. Yep. >> We've got X Games gold medalist like skateboarders. Yep. >> Like Skate IQ. >> Billionaires like Tom Bellow. >> We've got and we've got all of these different things like witchcraft, donkey hoof trimming. Like there's honestly like everything on school now and that's one of my favorite things about it. >> Yeah. The variety makes it very fun to just browse. >> Yeah. And this is a really interesting trend we've seen which is, you know, school is replacing social media for people. And I'll pull up some links here. >> A lot of people talking about this in the schoolers community. >> I'll get these links up. So, you know, here's some examples. I'm sure you guys have seen this, too. This is a common thing people have been talking about. How many of you get anxious when you go to regular social media, but going on school feels like going home? >> And everyone's like, "Yeah, once I start, this is my new scroll basically on school." >> Um, who replaced social media with school? He just checked his screen time and he's consuming less brain rot on social media and he's spending his time on school. What's fascinating is it it used to go to like social media and it's now being replaced with school. >> Mhm. >> And it's happening more and more every day and you know you know everyone is saying the same thing. >> Yep. >> Um this guy replacing other apps with school stopped using these other things. He's doing it more and more every day. Um, and you know, there's hundreds of comments. >> Yeah. And the cool thing about that is when you're on social media, you're just consuming, but when you're on school, you're connecting and creating as well as consuming. >> Yeah. This this woman said the same thing since she joined school. Less time doom scrolling. And she noticed it from her screen time, too. >> It seems like it happens to people and then they don't really know it until they see their screen time. And then it's just switched it from like one place to another >> which is you know really interesting to see that schools starting to to do that. >> And another trend which makes sense given the first trend we've seen is school is becoming the main traffic source for a lot of communities now. And I'll pull these links up. So, you know, this guy said here, new member from school discovery already. He got someone he got a new member and he talked to the member and he's like, "Where did you come from?" And he found him on school by searching for the keyword ukulele. So, that's what I mean that there is pretty much everything on school now. Like this guy went to school discovery, typed ukulele and found this guy's >> ukulele nerd >> ukulele nerds community. >> Let's go >> and then joined it. And that's what's happening on Discovery. It's, you know, people are going there and searching for these obscure things and then there's things there and they're joining. >> Yeah. A lot of people think that to get traffic from discovery, you need a huge active group, but also the search is used so frequently that even if you have a small group, if there's the right keywords, people will find your group. >> Yeah. It's just a unique niche, right? Like >> Yep. Yeah. Um, there's here's another one. Found via school community discovery. It's true. You really do get people finding you from discovery. >> That was four hours ago, that post. >> Yeah, >> that's cool. >> And there's a couple more. I add this one. So, this guy, >> the guy joined my community and I couldn't figure out how he found it. And so after he joined, he DM'd him and he said suggestion from a similar community. >> Nice. >> So that's not school discovery. That's not even searching. That is, you know, on the hobby plan we suggest communities in the sidebar over here. And so someone saw his community there, clicked it, and then joined. >> So cool. >> So all of these things are really starting to ramp up. like suggested communities are doing a lot, search is doing a lot and more people are visiting discovery and because we've got so many different communities on school now >> and because it is starting to become like replace social media for many people there's a lot of people on here and that's what's you know really driving this school network thing. >> Very cool. >> Yeah. And then there was the this one from Hazel and she got she's got a community about crochet. It's called Crochet Creations and she got 100 members, but I think she's got a lot more than that now. She's got 535 members now. >> Yeah. The cool thing about that post is she said she she got 100 members without making a single piece of content, running a single ad, or inviting any IRL friends. This is a rare exception, but it's still cool to see that it can happen. I think she's got over 500 now from Discovery from no external promotion, just Discovery. >> That's crazy. >> It's because she's got an interesting niche. Like that guy who searched for ukulele, right? Someone searches for crochet, >> right? Like >> Yeah. So, very cool to see that. And another thing is, you know, school's grown a lot this year. And one thing I'm proud of is we're our support team is still 100% human. We have no AI or bots or anything. Um, not only is 100% human, but we have 30 minute response times still on average. And we provide real human support on both of our plans, like the $9 and the 99. Um, which I think is a pretty cool thing. >> Yep. That's rare. And shout out to the school support team for all your amazing work here. So yeah, those are some highlights, but let's talk about some of the big features we shipped to school this year. >> So if you were here early on, you might remember we changed the school games this year. It used to be every month and then we changed it to quarterly at the start of this year and that's gone really well. We also made it, you know, top five in each category. >> Yep. We also merged the communities. We used to have two. One was called school games and one was called school community and now it's merged into schoolers. >> I can't believe that was this year. >> Yeah. So, these were two big moves earlier on in the year. And then we did the school 101 course. You know, a lot of people were saying, "Hey, how do I start a community? Is there any training or instructions on it?" And so me and Kirby made a nine module course um about how to start a successful community. >> Yep. Taking lessons from the 200,000 communities on school and finding the patterns and just boiling it down to nine simple lessons. >> Yep. And we are finished with this now. Every single module in here is done. If you haven't seen this already, go check it out. You just go to the schoolers community and you click classroom school 101. Then after we did that, we shipped affiliates, which is a big feature that a lot of people wanted for a long time. >> That was so hyped. >> Yeah. And so, you know, the affiliates feature, you just go to your settings, affiliates, and you can turn it on with one click. >> One click. >> And then people can earn money by referring members to your community. >> Yeah. Your members will help you grow your group. >> Yeah. Then we shipped the map feature. That was a another big one. So looks like this. Now you can see where your members are all around the world. >> Yep. >> We ship pinned comments. It's a small one, but I think it has quite a big impact how you can, you know, pin somebody's comment. You can just go like this. Pin comment. Yep. >> Right. We also send an email notification to the user when you pin their comment or their post because it's a really positive feeling when you get pinned >> and so it makes the person feel really good and then they'll do it again. Yeah. >> Yep. >> Then a big one, native video hosting. >> So, you know, not too long ago you couldn't host videos on school. You had to put them outside on Vimeo or whatever. >> Y >> now you can host your videos on school. so much easier and it's free. >> It's very fast to upload, very fast to process and we have chapters and everything and it's unlimited use included in both plans. >> Which is pretty crazy. >> Yep. >> Native live calls. >> No Google Meet or Zoom needed. >> Yeah. Replaces that. >> And the best thing about those two features combined is that before if you did a call to upload the recording, you had to go to Zoom, download it. It takes 10 minutes. Upload it. It takes 10 minutes. And then you can make a post. Now, once you finish the call, you click one button in your notifications and it just creates the post. Boom. Like that. >> Yeah, the two work very well in combination. Like you can now go live in your community with like a click. You just click go live. You select if you want to do a call or a webinar. >> Yep. >> And then Yeah. You can record it and post it >> in like a minute >> or less. Yeah, it's crazy. >> And it's unlimited use as well. And some people ask, well, how many people can attend up to 10,000? >> Yeah. >> And I think Zoom to have 10,000 people on a webinar, I think you're paying like at least three or four grand a month. >> Yeah. >> You can do it on school for nine bucks. >> Plus, Zoom charges you more for recordings >> and uploading. School just does it included. >> Yep. native webinars. We ship that, too. So, that's just like a call except it's like everyone else has their video off and you have you can bring people up onto the stage. We ship both of these things. Then, we shipped, you know, the $9 plan. So, school used to only have a $99 plan, but we shipped the hobby plan, which is N bucks. And with that, we did the suggested communities. >> Yep. >> Which is what's helping a lot of people get discovered, too. And this I think helped us unlock a lot of those, you know, longtail communities like all the hobby ones. >> Um, so not only did we, you know, make the product way better, but then we made the price lower. >> Um, >> and then we did Apple and Google Pay, which um, reduces friction for people to sign up. >> Yep. >> And tiers, which was a big one. So now you can set membership tiers. If you go to pricing, you can use the premium model or tiers and people see, you know, a page like this. Um, and people are still, there's already some cool stories of how people have used this, but it's still a new feature and we're waiting for more data to come in. And then we also shipped analytics. you know, school. One criticism you could make about school before was, oh, it doesn't have um the best analytics, >> but then we added, you know, very good analytics. So now you can see, you know, your members, engagement, cohorts, MR over time, unit economics, cash flow, conversion rate of about page and free trials. >> Yep. last 30 days, last year, and your attention, >> both aggregate and cohorted. So, it went from like being amateur to being hardcore pretty fast. >> Yeah. You can now run a legit business on school and all of the data is given to you. >> Yeah. So, the this is not everything that we shipped this year, but these are the big ones, I think. Um, and yeah, I think this has been a really good year for the product because it got a lot better and it got a lot cheaper and it's rare that these things happen at the same time. >> Yeah. >> Um, >> yeah. >> Yep. Shout out to the engineers. >> Yes. Good work, school engineering team. Now, our mission is to help 1 billion people find community, right? And how we think about this is we want to have the best product. So you should be able to do everything you need to do with school. >> And I think we've made a lot of progress on this this year. The native video hosting, the native live streaming, the recording and posting the recording experience, analytics, >> you know, all of that. >> Then lowest prices. We definitely made some progress on this this year. >> Yep. We now have a $9 plan which is basically free. Um, we also have the lowest fees. >> Mhm. >> Yeah. So, the lowest transaction fees available as well as like the lowest price, best product, best distribution. This means that school gives you members by being on school. You grow just by being on school basically. Um, because who wouldn't want that? >> Yeah. >> Right. And so we've made a lot of progress with this this year too. I think the suggested communities did a lot. And by bringing more people onto school and them starting to use it like social media as a replacement, it now is becoming a distribution channel of its own, right? Um and this is proven with this like 30% of memberships coming from the school network. >> Y >> and this is growing as well. So we made some progress on best distribution and then lowest churn you know it's not just about getting members it's also about keeping them and we've made significant progress on decreasing churn platformwide and that's shown in this chart here. >> Let's go. >> So we're going to continue to bring churn down. >> Yeah. It was like over 30% at its peak and now it's at 15. So it's halfed. Yeah, we've brought it down 5% this year alone. Um, and that's significant. And so, you know, we're going to continue to make the product better. We're going to continue to keep prices very low and fees. We're going to continue to improve distribution so that you can get more members. And we're going to continue to optimize churn. And we're just going to keep working on this. Um, yeah. And you know, our mindset with this is the best for the most for the least. We want to make the best product for the most people so that you know, almost anyone can use it for the least amount of money. >> Let's go. >> Cuz that's how we're going to help 1 billion people find community. >> Boom. >> So, I think we made some good progress on this this year. Now, what about next year? like what are we thinking? Well, one of the first things we're going to ship is we're going to show you your traffic sources. So, we're going to show you where your members come from. Um, so if you're using like Instagram, Tik Tok, um you're running ads, right? >> We we will show you where your members are coming from. >> And with this, you'll also be able to see how many members you're getting from the school network. Yep. >> Cuz you know, we showed you like 30% of members come from school. Right now only really we know this, but we need to make this visible to you guys so that you can see it and then you'll know where Yeah. what other channels are working too. >> Yeah. The craziest thing I think about this is you can go to a specific member, click settings, and see where they found your group. >> Yeah. >> That's insane. >> Yep. That one's going to be very, very powerful. I think, you know, with the improvements we're making to analytics and the traffic sources, everyone on school will have the best analytics and tracking that this industry has ever seen. Honestly, it would be like near impossible for you to even set this up yourself if you had your own software engineering team. I'm not even joking. So, like everyone by default is going to have the best analytics ever. >> Crazy. Then we're going to make significant improvements to discovery. Discovery is going to be a huge point of focus for us next year. You know what's crazy is a lot of people are finding communities on school like 30-ish% right. >> We have done nothing to optimize this. Honestly, >> the focus has been on improving the experience once you're in a community and less on helping people find communities. >> Exactly. And you know some people I I see some people post they're like hey I don't understand these search results. I search for something and I see this random stuff. >> Yeah. It's it's far it's it's suboptimal for sure. >> Yeah. >> So you know imagine if we actually focused on this. >> Yep. >> It's going to get a lot better. >> People will be getting a lot more members. >> So improved search results different sorting mechanisms. So like we might show trending or new >> or >> um so that you know it changes because right now it's quite static. >> Yeah. >> Um and also you'll be able to see how many members you're getting from school. Yeah. We're going to improve this a lot. Then risk score plus auto moderation features. So, this isn't really an issue for uh paid groups at all, but when you've got a free group, and when the free group is small, it's usually fine. But once you get a big free group, >> yep, >> you can have problems with, you know, spam and people that don't even seem real kind of thing. And so, we're going to put a lot of effort on this next year, too. Basically, we're going to use AI to provide a risk score on membership requests. So, like we'll look at all kinds of different things. >> Um, yeah, I don't want to say what we're going to look at exactly because one of these people might be listening to this episode, but we know basically what these people look like and we'll be able to provide a score of how risky we think this member is. >> Mh. And then for auto approval, you'll be able to set whether you want to let this person in >> or not. And so that way you might be able to auto approve the people that are fine and then decline the people that are high-risisk and maybe hold for manual approval the people that are in the gray area. >> Very cool. >> And so, you know, a lot a lot of things are going to be more automated, too. So, like membership approval process and also moderation and things. Um, yeah. I also think we're gonna have this feature where once your group gets really big, you can turn on like SMS verification for posting, commenting, and DMing. >> Mhm. >> So that once your group's big, in order to comment, post or DM, they have to have a verified phone number. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. >> And then, you know, if that account gets banned >> Yeah. >> that number's gone. >> Yeah. Yeah. And it's way harder for bad actors to get hundreds of actual phone numbers. It's expensive. >> Yeah. So, and this could be a toggle that you could turn on so you don't, you know, we don't force it on everyone. But once a group gets big and if it's free, >> Yeah. there's going to be a lot of tools to really improve the quality um and make it more automated so it's not such a >> a burden on the the team. >> Nice. We're also we've already started on this, but we're making significant improvements to the notification system. So, you know, we a lot of people I think we send a lot of people too many notifications and then some people want notifications for things and they can't get them. So, it's it's a balance. We want to send less of the noisy notifications that people don't really care about and then introduce some new ones that people do care about. >> Mh. And so, you know, we've already made improvements on this. If you go to the notifications page now, you can turn likes notifications off with just a single click for every group you're in. This slows this, you know, reduces the volume a lot. >> Yep. >> And then to see your notifications for each group, you can just like click this and then you can see them here. >> Mhm. >> Right. And you and we introduce So, it's way easier to tune your notifications. You can also see which ones are default and which ones are custom. And we introduced some new ones. So, and these are just for admins. When you get a membership request, you can now turn this on. Some people wanted to be notified when someone requested access. >> Yep. And new post as well. >> And yeah, new post. Some people wanted this. Generally, the smaller groups want this. >> Yep. And we also made it possible for you to turn this off. >> So let's say you've got a big community and you hire a team of moderators, you know, they're looking after the reported content. You don't need to be notified. So now you can turn that off. So it it helps a lot. So we're going to continue to make improvements to the notification system, including the ability to like just filter by different types. So, you could click this and filter by mentions or likes or comments or whatever. So, you know, we're going to put a lot of effort into this making it better. Also, languages and currencies. So, this is part of like internationalization. So, you know, right now school's only in English and only in like US dollars, but we've seen huge interest in school outside of English-speaking countries. Um, crazy interest. And so, you know, we're going and what what is really crazy is that a lot of people actually use it >> in English in US dollars when that's not even what they speak. >> Yeah. Shout out to Latin America and also massive parts of Asia seem to be having strong demand for this. >> So next year we're going to you know make school so that it can be in different languages. So there'll be a language setting you can select it and then let's say you know if someone is in France and they view your about page it'll be like in French and it will be in euros. So it feels more natural to them. So conversion rates will probably go up. >> Also, if someone's if someone speaks French, then when they go to Discovery, they shouldn't see all this English stuff. They should see French stuff, right? Their suggested communities should be French, not English. >> Um, and so by supporting languages and currencies, you know, the conversion rates will go up significantly in in a lot of countries. And also we're just going to bring a huge huge new markets onto the platform and improve discovery too by allowing them to see discovery in their language. >> Yeah. >> And then incremental improvements to all features. These are the main you know things we're going to focus on here which basically is internationalization not and then quality of life things and then also analytics and helping you get more members. We want to help you get more members, show you where your members are coming from, improve school as a product and open it up to the world basically. And we and we also want to improve all the features we've already got. So like live streaming, we want to make it better. Webinars, we want to improve everything that we're doing. We also want to make it faster. >> What a year. >> What? This year or next? >> This year and hopefully next. Yeah. So, merry Christmas everybody. >> Merry Christmas. >> The next school news is going to be, I think, in January. >> Yep. >> Oh, and a final reminder, the school games, it ends, >> it's the 28th. >> Let's have a look. >> Let's double check. >> So, the last games >> Oh, no. 19th >> ends December 19th. >> Oh, four days. Wow. >> Yeah. So, go to schoolers, click on games. There's four days left in the Q4 school games >> and the winners of this will be seeing you I think it's in January, right? >> Uh yes. >> Yeah. So, merry Christmas everyone. See you next year. See you up.