The Truth About Skool - A Strategic Marketing Overview

The State of the Marketing Union

 This is Jason Parker and welcome to the

first episode of the state of the marketing union. Today, we're talking about

school from a high level, strategic standpoint. You won't find these unique

insights anywhere else, especially not when you search for school reviews,

because all you're going to get are affiliate reviews that are incentivized

today.

You're going to get the truth about school

and joining me is my business partner at Parker and Kirkland, Mr. Charles

Kirkland. He's one of the top. Hey dude. Uh, let me introduce you real quick

because, uh, you have an amazing background and people, if they're not aware of

you, they need to be aware of the, the bombs, the absolute bombs you've knocked

out of the park for, for, uh, various clients.

So I was going to say, you know, Charles,

he's one of the top fractional CMOs in the world. Uh, he helped a health e

commerce brand grow up on 550, 000 per month to 4. 3 million per month and hit.

40, actually 34 million in a year. And most recently helped a financial trading

company hit their first 1. 5 million a month.

And they had never had a seven figure a

month before. And, uh, together, Charles and I have helped, uh, two clients,

rock to rocket to 137 million in sales and three and a half years, because we

only work with us. A small amount of VIP clients at a time as fractional CMOs.

And to reach out, you can email us directly at Jason at Parker Kirkland.

com. So before we rattle, before we get

into anything that may rattle cages about school, because I want to be as fair

as possible and we know we have some insight. Uh, insider insight, secret

insider insight that says, you know, things are changing over there, but let's

talk about what's good about school because I don't really, my intention is not

to get on here and fillet school, but I want to give a high level overview and

something highly strategic because when I search for things on school, Charles,

I don't see anything that, uh, you know, isn't totally biased because it's

totally incentivized is all I'm saying.

Yeah, well,

I think you've got a good point, but I'm

going to give an example. Humans act in their own best interest and if it's my

best interest to say school is the greatest thing on the planet I don't know

how you know Civilization existed before school, but you need to use my link to

sign up That's gonna be I hate to say it for school or or even buying an iPhone

unfortunately Affiliates have gotten really good at learning how to manipulate

Google Manipulate reviews and if you get someone who's got incentivized You

know, quote unquote, reason to say good things.

You hear nothing but good things, or you

hear the classic. It's amazing, but there's like one little minor thing. Like,

I don't like the color of the submit button, but other than that, life is good,

dude, you know, with anything, when it's incentivized. I hate to say it. You're

biased. You're going to get biased activity.

So I want to back up for a second and Um

kind of just talk about Sam Ovens as a person. The dude is instrumental in

basically Shaping internet marketing from a consulting standpoint is the way we

know it I mean, he really was the first person who popped on the scene with

consulting that was affordable And in such a way that you could actually

understand it before this it was like Lee McIntyre or a handful of other people

with higher end stuff, which is great But sam really is a great person.

He's great at teaching the consulting and

School was born out of quote unquote, I guess a frustration the way people

consume information

What do you so what do you think is good

about it? What are what are they paying for when you're paying 99 a month to

run a school? community and And what do you get when you're joining a school

community, uh, from just, you know, an incentivized review, or incentivized

standpoint?

I mean, think about that.

I mean, I think, well, think about this.

I'm gonna back it up for a second. So, we've got Kajabi, which has got like a

gazillion dollars of funding, something like that. You've got WordPress

wishlist member, which has been around for a while. Um, we want to look, you

know, what's the school do, what is the purpose of it?

It's basically designed for me as an

entrepreneur. I've got a vision. I've got a goal. Okay. I'm going to create a

quote unquote membership with some type of paid aspect of it. And before that

you were dealing with Kajabi, Circle, Um, wishlist member, any number of, you

know, learning management plugins. I mean, there's just tons and tons of stuff.

And the reality of it is you had to be

fairly technical to set this up. Um, you know, from a member level standpoint

from, did you get your login? Did you get your password? Did you get your

Stripe account set? Did Stripe even ban you? Will Stripe even take your

account? And that's one of the things to look at.

It's designed for people who quote unquote

aren't marketers to come in and say, Oh, I can now share my information. And,

and you know, just looking at it, there's an example of someone who's selling

like how to be a man. I think the guy's got like a hundred some thousand users.

So it's designed for the non technical person.

Now, I will say if you're at seven, eight

or nine figures, I would definitely not particularly recommend it. Look, maybe

not even do it at six figures because you're building your quote unquote

community on someone else's racetrack James, Framco says that much better than

I do and he's got a point if you build a facebook group How many people do we

know who've been like your facebook group is closed down how many youtube

channels have been shut down?

So when you're building on school, you're

building on someone else's rented your Your fortunes are tied to the fortunes

of school.

And I will say there's a pain of disconnect

too. If you do happen to have a community on there and you don't like what

changes there, you're still eating 99 a month, which equals about 1, 200 a

year.

At which point. If you're an advanced

marketer and you're able to manage projects in my mind, what I would do is I

would take that 1, 200 and I would go get a bubble developer and I would just

have a little community built on bubble. You know, if I wanted similar features

for about the same, about that price, uh, and then you can run that for years.

So a bubble is a no code platform that

anyone can use to do that. If you're just starting out. I think there's a

misconception that you're going to get on there and you're going to be able to

leverage, uh, the, the traffic it's already on there, the users that are on the

already on there. But the fact is what I'm seeing at least is that they're

really kind of leveraging your, your audience.

So you're paying, it's kind of. Honestly,

the way I look at it from a very high level for someone like me and you is it

sort of like a reverse affiliate program in that you're building on there,

you're paying them to send them your audience, you know, but that's from a very

high level, uh, overview or just from looking down on the birds, a bird's eye

view after 20 years and thinking, Oh, I would just build this on my own brand.

I would just build my own brand. I would

have my own developers build, uh, you know, this on bubble or something like

that. Or I would just have it on discord or Facebook. And when I, if I wanted

all the gamification features, I would have it built definitely on bubble on my

own application, uh, for very cheap, because you could just go to Upwork and

search for bubble developers who work for, you know, 10, 15 an hour.

And, uh, for the same price, you could

pretty much have a bubble app, probably that has all the features of your one

particular community, you would be essentially sort of. You know, people are

calling for white labeling this thing and this would be better than white

labeling. You would have complete control over it and anything that happened in

the future.

So that would be one option. I think

besides, uh, besides this, if you're looking to do it, if you feel like you

could manage that project. So, but another thing is also like, if you want to

do a free group, discord or, or Facebook groups, whatnot, I have a lot of

features. They don't have the gamification. I love the gamification part.

And I'll say a lot of people, uh, you know,

it's a game of firing off dopamine in people's brains and gamification helps in

that. It's not quite like the dopamine fire you get for making a sale, but it

does help, you know, having leaderboards and that sort of thing. So I'll say

that is an advantage of.

School, but in my mind, I would have those

features just built in, you know, to my own app and I would just oversee it.

And I don't think it would take too much technical knowledge to be able to get

a bubble app and get a couple of a 10 an hour folks on, on Upwork to build a,

you know, hate, I wouldn't say rip it off, but they can build the same features

into your own, uh, your own community like that.

Well, that's one of those things where

like, I'm going to back up. Fifteen years ago, people were using their own

bulletin board forums, it's hosted on their server, their information, it's

their, it's their world. And, really, the evolution of that went from things

like the warrior forum, And you know, like, which is, you know, open group

community to your private community would be, be form and number of other

platforms.

And that migrated to Facebook really from a

group standpoint, Facebook realized that groups, when you have groups of

people, whether it's school or anything else, they come together and they, they

congregate. And because of that, you can show them, Hey, here's, A, B, C, D,

and they will change, you know, go into A, B, C, D, you know, different groups.

And the way that school is kind of got it,

which I do like the gamification, it's really designed for, I have knowledge,

I'm a CPA, I'm a financial planner, I'm, I'm, insert whatever, and I want to

share my knowledge, and I want to do this In a very simple format where I'm not

worried about security SSLs. I can't manage projects I just want to like vomit

and I don't mean vomit is negative But you know, I want to share my share my

knowledge and that's a big deal That's kind of the the attraction of it.

But here's now jason. I'm gonna pose this

question to you Going forward, how would you grow that? What, what, what is the

things that would make you, you know, with the current platform, how, what

direction would you take?

I would say the first thing I would do is I

would try to integrate this with the whole product launch community.

If I were school and the way I would do

that is I would go to the JV zoo. I would go to, uh, you know, uh, warrior plus

I would go to maybe even, um, you know, some CPA networks and whatnot. Tried to

integrate this with, um, to, to make it easy for the launch world to get

involved and keep bringing people in.

Because right now, what I see school doing,

and this is just from the standpoint of looking at, uh, you know, the business

owner standpoint there. In my, I don't know what the state is over there, the

state of things, but they seem to be in my view of things. And what I've seen

over the years to be bleeding cash.

And I mean, they, it seems like people are

successful, but, um, they're totally reliant on, um, a massive ad spend, which

you can see nothing really wrong with that. But I have the suspicion that they

were hoping it was going to be this organic growth sort of thing. Um, but that

sort of thing with, uh, integrating with JVZoo or, or ClickBank or anybody

would allow for, uh, risk free growth, you know, instead of dumping all this ad

capital in there.

And that will help because, um, there's

just natural attrition to subscriptions. You know, I mean, like people are

going to pay three to six, Months of subscriptions that they're going to bail.

So, which means this vehicle is not really going to grow by itself. Um, it's,

it requires a lot of ad spend or a lot of traffic.

And that's why I would integrate it with,

uh, various platforms. That's the first thing I would do because we saw that

with warrior form. Speaking of warrior form, remember the WSO community, I

think freelancer came along and bought warrior, uh, worry form, but it grew, it

grew and grew when they allowed affiliate programs to connect to warrior,

warrior plus, and you know, I'm sorry, warrior form and generate that traffic

directly to the forum, which created a massive spur of users.

And that's exactly what would happen here.

I believe with school, if they, if they were to integrate with the product

launch world, got on munch eye and all that sort of thing and really go beyond

the beyond the bounds. But. There's a lack of available integrations in terms

of being able to bring traffic in, you know, and they're, it looks like they're

bleeding money.

I think this would stop the bleeding.

That's. In my opinion, I don't know what's going on there. Exactly. We have

some insider knowledge of the secret, but I don't know. It seems that they're

bleeding money because I mean, at this point, they've been going on since

January, it's October, they're still pounding meta and whatnot.

I was thinking they were, they were

probably thinking it was going to take on a life of its own and grow by itself.

Problem is attrition. The problem is a lack of being able to, um, integrate

with these platforms and whatnot, that can actually bring risk free traffic to

you. That's my opinion.

No, I totally agree on that.

And when you look at that collaboration

type marketing, and you're right, JVZoo versus Warrior Forum, Warrior Plus,

just use this as an example, both of them grew because A, they had integrated

in. The more integrations you've got, like Zapier, that's an example, Zapier

integrates with everything. So, from a school standpoint, and maybe they have

this, My question is, could you integrate with Zapier?

How do you, because like, an example, me

and Jason have courses. Let's just pretend that we're, we're selling the

course. Okay, I have to figure out how to make click funnels, go high level,

insert, thrive cart, whatever, to integrate this user into a membership

platform. And, the thing that we're looking at is, the processing would take

place in like, click funnel, stripe, go high level.

And school would then be quote unquote,

just that membership platform, you know, and from that integration standpoint,

it would make it easier. And like you said, where are people going for

knowledge? Where are these launches happening at? Because if we do a product

launch, okay, I had to put people somewhere, you know, we have to put them into

Kajabi, WordPress, wishlist member, Facebook group, insert, whatever, and

that's the thing.

If the more you can integrate and become

quote unquote, part of the, I would call it almost a nomenclature of launches.

Where you're, you know, like you've got a countdown sequence, you've got your

timer, oh, you're used circle, you know, or school. It would, it would just

make it a little more cohesive.

Well, right now that you can't sell with,

I'm sorry, I didn't catch it.

I catch it right now that you can't,

there's not a landing page builder within school. I'm not saying there should

be, but you can more effectively sell a group. If you had a landing page, you

know, an official sales page or something like that, if it did integrate with

that. If it did integrate with JBZoo and such, I think they would, they would

see an explosion of risk free growth is what I think because of these factors.

And I'm not saying, you know, school needs

to be everything to everyone. It can remain about what it is, but allow more

outside integrations, you know, but I think, but I think Zapier, it may be

allowed on there to a degree in terms of connecting with autoresponders and

such, which is fine, but it also kind of begs the question, what, what exactly

are you paying for?

Because. Well, I'm not going to say, I'm

not going to say certain things because like I said, I want to be fair to, I

want to be fair with this review, highlight what's good and bad. Now I think

that people have the impression that they're going to like, especially

beginners. They think they're going to get on there and they're going to

leverage the traffic that's already there.

The users are already there. But the fact

is that I believe from what I've seen school is just. It's, it's going to be

the other way around. It's going to take your audience and, and, you know, the

people I've seen do well on there, they have an audience of some kind. Some of

them have smaller audience, but they have an audience.

And so let me go, let me go here because I

want to read some of these stuff, some of these comments to you from Facebook,

if that's okay. Now this is a guy who's just. I'm not going to say, I'm not

going to say anything bad about him. His name is Dave Daly. He said, yeah, I

paid 99 per month for school for four months and got 22 free members.

It's not a great place for complete

beginners. If you already have something to sell, then...