Video Title: How To Launch A Skool From Scratch (4 Essential Steps)
Author: Adam Luke
Duration: 24 minutes
Description: A guide for launching a Skool community from scratch, aimed at beginners interested in building an online community for profit.
"Most people are going to really overthink this... but then they never end up launching."
"If you really want to start, scale, and grow your school community, commit to this for the long term."
Adam Luke’s video serves as a comprehensive guide for beginners looking to launch a Skool community. By emphasizing the importance of imperfect progress, strategic branding, community engagement, and consistent effort, he provides a blueprint for building a successful online community that can lead to profitable outcomes.
I run the number one tech community on school and the business makes over six figures every month with just a 5% churn. And if I lost everything today, I'm going to build a brand new school community from scratch and show you just how easy it is to set up your community and set you on that path to earning 10K a month with your online community. And at the end of the video, I'll take you through my biggest lesson learned a year on school and really the secret to building the Captain America of school communities. So, if you're a course owner, you're a content creator, or you're simply looking to crack some million-dollar deals and make money online, grab that coffee and let's lock in. So, most people are going to really overthink this. They'll spend weeks and months building out the most amazing materials, branding it perfect, getting everything just down to the minute detail, perfect, but then they never end up launching. Well, not on this channel. We are all about imperfect progress, which beats perfect procrastination every single day of the week. to in just 10 minutes. I'll show you just how easy it is in four steps to build a community that is going to beat 99% of the communities that are on school. So the first step, what we need is to get your free trial to get you 14 days free trial to school so you can test it out, stretch test it for 2 weeks before we launch. So we hop on over to what is the greatest newest community that is on school, Lockin with Adam. And right here, the reason we're doing this is you can start your school free. So, if I click this link, it will take you and say, "Adam, Luke invited you. Amazing." And then you create your community and then it'll give you an option between a hobby plan or a pro pro plan. I'm personally on the pro plans for all of the communities that I manage because I want all of the features and the lower fees. But for you, I just recommend you start off with the hobby plan. If you're actually unsure what your community is going to be about, we're thinking it in a three-step framework. It could either be pain, passion, or profession. Pain is a real world transformation that you've been through. I think this one is the most powerful. If you've lost a lot of weight, you put on a lot of muscle or you've quit your job that you hate it and you found a really clever way to make money online. I really like pain as the transformation. That's what I'm going to pick today. But you could also do profession. If you have a job already, someone is already making money from the work you do. Just move from employed to self-employed and start charging that as your business. Maybe you're an accountant, you work in sales, marketing, maybe you work in HR. Not sure why you do that to you in the world, but all I'd say if you've got a profession, that could be your what your school community is actually about originally. Or it could be the most fun one, which is passion. If you've already spent thousands of hours into something, maybe play pickle ball, AI automations, maybe it's just something as simple as video games, or you love a TV show like I do like Dragon Ball Z, and you're so passionate about you could talk about it all day, every day. There is a community, an opportunity that you can turn that passion into profit with school. So, let's jump on in and let's set the tone of this new community. Come along here. Go to the general and then I click the community name to avoid this becoming the most vanilla group on the planet. I'm going to do the corporate weapon academy. I'm going to have some fun with the branding, the group description. This is going to display on the right as the kind of thumbnail of the community. So, we want this to pop. And you want to use a very simple framework. I help X with Y. That's it. That's all you want to do. So, let's fill in the blanks. I help students and graduates land their dream job. Boom. How good does that look? Actually, that looks amazing. Do your custom URL. I'm not going to do that cuz you can't change it, but definitely get your custom URL. And cuz school's so new, there's actually some really cool ones. Now, we need to get the cover image, which is really important. Two options. Um, you can go to Google and I could literally just type in Wolf of Wolf of Wall Street and I could literally just grab this image. Look how good these look. This one looks amazing and this one looks amazing. I think this one looks really serious. I think this one is the kind of party vibe that I'm looking for. So, I would literally just save this image. You could literally go with this method cuz it takes like 2 seconds and you're taking advantage of a brand that exists. I think if you're going to build a long-term brand, you might want to avoid this kind of method. But to get started, this works just fine. But the other method that I'm going to show you, which I really like, is u making a new Canva document. So, what we want to do, go to Canva, um create a brand new designs. I'm just going to use a YouTube thumbnail because it has exactly the same dimensions. And what we're going to do is make it really simple and create this in just 2 minutes. So, first and foremost, you want to have a personal brand that you are building alongside this. So, just take a beautiful photo like I am here. Then, we're going to add some text. So add a text box and I'm just going to put get grad job. Boom. Right here. It's a little bit small at the moment, but I'm going to work my magic in 2 seconds. Going to have a background. What you want to do is come over here, default gradient colors, and just pick one of these here. I'm going to go with this. It's a little bit more serious. It's a little bit darker. Looks kind of cool. That's what I'm going to go with. And I'm going to make this big and beautiful. We're going to make this white so it really pops against the background. But let's do it. White. Amazing. And then within I don't know call it two minutes I have got a beautiful thumbnail that is ready to rock and roll. Go download share and then we will I'll put this quality a little bit higher. Put it PNG and we're ready to rock and roll. That was like 2 minutes. So we've got two thumbnails that we can use. We can either use the thumbnail which is the Wolf of Wall Street which I really really rate. It actually goes in with the brand of Corporate Weapon Academy. Or I've got this one right here. You tell me in the comments the direction you would go with your community. I think if you're going to build a long-term brand, this one makes total sense and it looks absolutely freaking gorgeous. But honestly, either will work. All right. Now, we do need an icon. And I didn't really think about that. So, let's go make an icon very quickly. Okay. Amazing. Now, what we're going to do is download our icon and we're going to upload that. And this whole video and the premise of this is just to get started quickly within 10 minutes. So, we've got our title, Corporate Weapon Academy. Get that grad job. If I'm honest with that, I'm looking at it. I actually think what would work well is grad jobs with Adam. I actually think that would probably be better with the vibe that I'm coming up with. I think the corporate web academy looks amazing. That would make sense if I was doing the Wolf of Wall Street, but I think this is perfect. Now, why don't we set that live? I think it's already done. Look how good this is already starting. and we're starting to make our way through the onboarding process. So now what we need to do is do the homepage and let me show you how freaking simple this can be. Evelyn Vice runs one of the most respected best communities on school hands down. She is even featured on the thumbnail right here because she's one of the great. So is Jack the person I work with as well. But if you have a look on Grow with Evelyn's group, one of the best communities on school, it's literally very simple text and it has three images to join and 2,000 members have signed up. I want to show you how simple this can be to launch cuz we have an image. Doesn't look quite as beautiful as Evelyn's, but we have an image that if we were to put on our homepage right now and upload that straight away, we have something that matches Evelyn's vibe that is ready to launch right now. I'm going to launch with just simply one image. What you need to remember, you can use about seven, but it's not the sum, it's the average of the cards you use. So, make sure every single one is as good as the rest. And actually, you're probably best to have three really good cards than seven average cards. Now, with the copy, what I'm going to do is keep this really, really simple. You could literally do I help X with Y by Z. So, we'll fill that out. I help students and graduates land their dream 30k plus a year job. Grad job. Grad job. I don't even have to say after university. Boom. That's all it needs to say. Join now. Honestly, this looks perfect to start. Look how good this looks. So now step two is to go on to the classroom and we're going to build out our first materials. Now, this is the big mistake I see so many people make is they spend weeks and months building out so many crazy materials and they put so much energy into this classroom to make materials for the members before they even know what they want. Our first priority is get our first 5 to 10 founding members really understand the materials they need, the problems that they have, and then we'll build materials for there. So, our priority is an MVP classroom that we can launch that's really simple. I'm going to use an example from one of the biggest creators on the platform, a guy called Max Person. You probably know him. He crushes it on school, but he has a free group, one of the biggest on the platform. And actually, if you look on his classroom, it literally has three things in. These are all locked, if I'm honest, it's a free group. No one's really going to engage in his free group enough to unlock these. Most people won't. Um, but actually, if you look, it's just mostly three um free stuff. It's got a five-step module. It's got basically student interviews which are just basically please buy my page stuff cuz look how great my results are. And then it has this monthly contest which is literally just a pinned post and a competition they run on a month. Three core things. Cool. What we need to do is go to settings, go to our tabs, and we need to turn the classroom on. Bit of a pro tip for you. Just launch this without this. And you could literally launch this and turn this on today. But what we're going to do is build your MVP classroom. So we turn this on. Amazing. And then we go to our classroom. It's going to look like this. So, let's make a new course. All we need is very simple. The first one is a start here. Let's give everyone a beautiful welcome into the community. Then our next one is going to be a vault. You can call this resources. So, this is going to be scripts and blueprints and playbooks. And I'll show you exactly what I would do in a second. And then it would be some kind of level unlock book a oneto-one call. And then boom, right here you now have a very simple structure and a skeleton for a classroom that we'll build out. Start here. What you want to do is just pin some intro posts, some accountability posts. Maybe you've turned on the map and just show people around your school. You don't want to their knowledge of where things are to get in the way of learning resources. I'll show you what I would do in a second. And then book a onetoone. You can even have this paid. So you can start making money today from your school community. How you do that? Edit the course. Put that as buy now. um put it to I don't know I think 195 if you don't really have an audience you know I would probably charge something closer to 1500 but maybe you want to go for 3.95 right here boom and now you have a paid element in your classroom and all you need to do is do the same thing that we did as put a thumbnail and I'll show you very quickly now what I would do and that is the classroom now in the resources section you might think I don't have any resources or playbooks and blueprints to launch that's absolutely fine I'm going to use another example from a really good community called um one of the first I ever joined AI automations agency hub. I actually think this is the biggest community by members on the platform. It's almost got a quarter million and if you look into his classroom which is Liam Lee, one of the big AI um influencers in the space, his looks really packed his classroom for his free group. But as you go into it, let's just choose AI foundations. They're actually just his free YouTube videos cuz and the value ad here to someone who's joining his free group, it gets lost on YouTube. It's really hard to actually find unless they've got playlists that the videos you want in here. He's actually segmented them up into chat bots, voice agents. He segmented them up into the model, the foundations, launching, mindset, marketing, and you just have all his YouTube videos. So, if you've got some content, literally just pin that in your resources, and then you'll have a beautiful classroom with resources that people can check out. And that's exactly what I have done. If you look into my classroom in my vault has all my YouTube videos. I'm building them out over time and then I've got my value that I'm posting every single day to our members. Amazing. But what we need to do now is focus on the biggest value ad that you can do when you're just starting out. And that is bring together people with a similar interest and goals and give them as many opportunities to connect as possible. So that's the community itself. So, let's build out the tabs so people can engage as little gray matter as possible when they post to really encourage them. So, what we're going to do is come over to schoolers and we're going to take some inspiration from again one of the biggest and best communities on school. It's for schoolers and actually they've just got four tabs. Updates, gems, fun, and discussion. We're going to take inspiration from them. One of the best communities on school and biggest. Of course, they know what they're doing. We're literally going to copy and paste similar framework. So, we come over here. We go to settings. we go to our categories and we're going to add some new ones. So firstly, we're going to do updates. This is going to be all the cool stuff and updates that you are going to roll out over time for your community and you want to really build this in public with your founding members. So that's updates, all the cool stuff, announcement, guest speakers, all that good stuff you've got. I'm going to delete general discussion cuz I don't like it. Updates. Amazing. Then we're going to do gems. I like gems because gems is all the tips and the tricks and all them amazing value that you're going to add. Even just with gems, think of this as like your email list. You're just giving value to your members. And if you just did two or three a week to your community, that's value enough to be in your community. Um, and actually a lot of the members will just kind of want to join to be in your proximity, particularly you've got a low ticket or a free group. actually just seeing the value that you drop in the group a few times a week is enough to warrant the membership. The next one I'm going to do is a general capture all which is chat. I'm going to have this beautiful fun emoji cuz my group is all about color and vibrancy. And the final one which is the most important I cannot believe I forgot this which is wins. No one wants to join a group that actually no one can actually achieve the goal and the outcome that you have promised and delivered. People want to see people winning. So, we want to have these four beautiful tabs. I hit refresh. Look how gorgeous that looks. And one final one that I would add if you want to just to launch and I'm going to use Evelyn's example. She actually has lots of different tabs here. And I would probably say a little bit of a critique is she could simplify this just a touch, but the one I really love is peer support. And how she's worded that peer support, it encourages not a guru model where I as the creator have all the answers. You guys should help each other out. You've got an assessment center up. Share your tips. You have just had an interview you passed. Share them stuff in the gems, but also support other people in peer support as well. So, I really like tab. That's another one that I would consider adding that I've got from Evelyn. You know what? Because we're amazing and we actually I want to show you actually what a amazing community looks like. I'm actually going to add that. And just want a little tidbit on this group because you can see it's really starting to come together. I have promised that I'm going to help you get your 30k grad job over after university. You need to pick a niche and an offer and a transformation that you've personally had a pain point that you know you can help. I got a job by the way that was like 50k straight from university. I absolutely know if they did the same thing as me, they would get at least a 30k grad job if they if I could give you all my knowledge in my head and everything I did, you would guarantee to get a 30k job. And this should scare you a little bit the transformation that you're actually delivering because we will then have to live up to them expectations. So do try and put your expectations high and really promise something that is out there that's difficult to reach. That will write you into a corner where we have to make the community world class to deliver on that promise. So now we're going to turn on our calendar and put some calls into the diary. Now this is where a lot of the community owners will burn themselves out. They'll put way too many calls in. They'll think more is actually more. It's not. Less is more. And this is something that I've found out as I've joined the group. Honestly, if my members would want me to be 247 on a live stream, I would do that quite honestly to have a world-class group. I'm gonna be honest, that is not the case. Someone like Liam Oley, I'm going to use him as an example again, a automation hub. He's got a really good example. Go into his calendar. He has one call a week, which is just Q&A with Liam. If I was paying $50 for a group and my favorite influencer, I could every single week jump on a call just them once and I knew every time and day. So, the time that I could join, that would be enough value for $50 for someone like myself. And for most people, that will be enough value. Having a call every day, I think, will actually put people off. Cuz what we want to do is make sure everything we've done is as high quality as possible and not dilute the quality by thinking, "Oh, well, I'm only turning up to one call a week and I'm missing all these other six." So, one call a week will be absolutely perfect. So, as we go into the calendar, we need to create an event. And actually school as you're starting out has actually got some good examples. A lot of people will make the names of these groups really crazy and out there like winners Wednesdays wacky woohoo or you know taco Tuesdays what whatever it might be. But when you're just starting out make it simple. The thing I really like is coffee. So we'll do coffee with Adam and we'll do a beautiful emoji because we want to have some fun. We want to have a beautiful emoji. Coffee with Adam and we'll keep the cats. You know what? I'm actually going to use that Wolf of Wall Street um because I I was actually I felt I wanted an opportunity to use this. Look at this coffee with Adam. Look at this. Amazing. Cool. So, now we have the opportunity for our members to jump on, grab a coffee, and talk to their favorite influencer and ask whatever questions they like. What I like is the community model and that's why Q&As and coffees and and masterminds are really good because you are encouraging other people to share their collective wisdom and experience and help each other out. And I really think a community is not only easier for you to manage because there's less pressure. It's also better you know you prefer I can't be an expert in every single field but I can actually assemble the Avengers in you know the student and grad space and I can get them in touch with the experts. So, you want to assemble the Avengers and give it give it make it as easy as possible for people to share all that wisdom and knowledge. And this is what we're doing. That is the concept that I'm trying to bring all of that out as I'm crafting and creating this new community. So, now we pretty much got everything we need to launch. We just need our first ever post. So, what I'm going to do is just use a prime example, what I did in my group, which is just to introduce yourself. And then you go here and you click and you just go intro yourself. Welcome. Introduce yourself. Hey. And then I need a name for these guys. So I would say hm I'd probably say hey graduates, right? Hey grads. Hey graduates. You need a name for the people who are in your group. I can't PewDiePie. Did he have I don't think he had them. He was bros. Right. So yeah, let's do that. Hey bros. So our shared goal. Um we can actually delete this cuz I've it doesn't really matter at the moment. We'll just get inside. You're completely free. Um much love. Introduce yourself. Actually, you know, I could just literally do this. Um where you're at. what's your um what's your dream what's your dream job and then anything about you and as you see in about 2 minutes I've crafted a really good introduc in introduction post that I can literally post to the community I will put this in updates I will do a beautiful gift so we're going to post it um and then we're going to pin it to feed like so and now welcome introduce yourself look how good this freaking is looking now we're ready to launch and we're actually ready how to get our first few members because as good as this community is, it's not much of a community without a community itself and without members. So, let me take you through a three-step process to actually get your first 100 members. And my next video that's going to be coming live is actually my growth system to get your first thousand plus members. And that whole video is going to be about growing a group. This video is more about having a group that you can actually promote. But let me take you through three steps to getting your first 100red members. In our paid community, we've got 1500 plus members and we've done that without a single sales call, a single ad or a single fancy funnel. We've done it just through free content online. So, the best way to grow, I would say step one is just grab your link, put that into the content that you already have in your profile. You must have an Instagram or a Facebook or something that you can share that link. And that's what I'm going to do right now. Grab settings, invite people. You know what? I'm not even going to grab this big link. Actually, I'm just going to grab this one right here. Copy this. Then I'm going to go to where I've created content in the past. And actually, when I was just starting out on YouTube, I created a lot of graduate content cuz I just wanted to share my journey cuz I went through a really tough battle to get my job. I wanted to share that to help others. And actually, if you see in the videos when I go to my most popular, I've actually had some really good success sharing that journey. But you know what? I never had somewhere to point that audience. That's a really big learning. And what really clicked with me in school is that if I had a group for graduates, that would have absolutely banged and I would probably be able to quit my job a lot sooner than I already did if I found school earlier. But what good news for you is you found school today and we're getting on community live right now. So what I'm going to do is just go to my community, go to my most popular videos. I'm just literally going to write a comment. So join my free community and then we're going to put a link. Join my free community. We're going to put that in there. We're going to have a party emoji. Amazing. Um, we're going to take Yeah, party emoji. Boom. Amazing. So, what we're going to do is literally just invite people to join my brand new free community by posting a link right here. I'm going to comment it and I'm going to pin it. So, now I have a video that's already continuing to generate traffic and now I've got a community that is launched. And now it takes you straight into it. Cool. The second method to get your first few members is actually join other communities and groups where your ideal avatar hangs out. So for me that would be student rooms. That would actually be stuff on like LinkedIn where I could find interns and students. Um what I personally do because I'm a community builder. I'm a community manager. I go on school and I add value post. If I search my own beautiful name and I find my post and I go on to just posts, you can see that I'm dropping value into schoolers itself because this is my ideal avatar. This is people who are already on school. They would either be interested in AI or they're interested in community building which is both of the domains and niches that I operate in. You can see I'm delivering value. So much so that Sam Ovens and Andrew Kirby are pinning my post into gems which is really nice. Thank you very much guys. And the third method is the most least scalable out of all of these. But if you don't have at least 10 or 100 members, you shouldn't be doing anything other than reaching out to people who you know can get value from your group. And I would do this by literally going to LinkedIn and I would literally type in intern. Now my search might be a little bit better than this. I might scrape. I might do something a little bit fancier. But in 10 minutes, I want to show you how I found my ideal avatar. Type intern in. And here would be people who are literally interns. I know interns would like to get a proper graduate job and I could just drop them all a message, connect with them and say, "Hey, if you want to learn how to get a graduate job, there is this greatest, newest community that I think you'd get a ton of value off and it's just launched today and it will be paid in the future, super expensive, worth a million dollars to you for to join today. If you just join it for free, I want to help you out. We can jump on a call, do all that good stuff. Don't make the message as long as this." But all that to say, you can just connect with people, deliver value on somewhere like LinkedIn and they would naturally find your group. And if you want to drop them a message as well, nice, beautiful loom, I would do that as well. Here is my biggest lesson learned a year on school and how you build the Captain America of school communities. I've met Alexozi, Sam Ovens, I've interviewed hundreds of entrepreneurs and community owners on school. And they're not special. They've got no secret source. But they do do one thing, and that's that they show up every single day. If you really want to start, scale, and grow your school community, commit to this for the long term. 90 to 100 days at least and show up every single day and add value. These guys who are successful, they're not special. They don't have it figured out, but they just try and improve every single day. They do the important thing, which is they show up. And if you want to see how I went from zero to 125K with a brand new community, check this out here. All right, see you in the next
🎉 Join my FREE Skool community: https://www.skool.com/lockin/about How to launch a brand new Skool community from scratch in 4 easy steps. If I had to grow a brand new Skool community from zero, without followers, without my network, and without cash this is how I would do it. A step by step guide for beginners, making money on Skool and building a thriving online community. 🚀 START ON SKOOL (FREE TRIAL): https://www.skool.com/signup?ref=4eca4b2b52324f67bc3d0a69e371a410 ⚡️ CHAPTERS 00:00 - Launch your Skool 01:05 - Unlock your FREE trial 01:44 - Niche 02:52 - Branding & Homepage 08:05 - Classroom 11:59 - Community 15:32 - Calendar 18:10 - Write your first post 19:20 - Your first 100 members 23:30 - How to win on Skool skool, skool games, skool community, alex hormozi, entrepreneur, entrepreneurship, making money online, content creator, online community,