There's a lot of hype around this recently, especially with the bearded man investing.

But what some of you may not remember or even know in the first place is how school came to be.

Well, you see this guy Sam Ovens used to run a massive course business.

He was doing like 20 million a year plus selling courses and consulting, which if you've ever been in this space, you know how difficult that is to do.

And he originally started his course on like Dropbox, I believe, and then just kind of had some Zoom calls to help out clients as they came in.

And then he upgraded to Kajabi and then he built out his own software, which was actually really slick looking.

I like it better than the way school looks today for the course content.

Although that took like three years.

But what he didn't like was how reliant his business was on Facebook communities, because that's where the consulting accelerator, which was his main community was hosted.

And according to Sam, it's just not that good of a user experience when you have to go to one place to watch the course, one place to ask questions, and another place to find out where the calls are.

And so he spent hundreds of thousands, presumably millions to build what we now know as school, a place for community calls and courses to all be within one spot.

But not only that, it also has gamification and payments in the same app.

It was super exciting when it first came out and obviously exploded in popularity.

And about nine months ago, I want to say, I said, may as well sign up and try out having a free community on school.

This is going to be a place for my YouTube folks to come hang out.

You guys can connect with each other.

I can learn more about what you're struggling with, help you.

And it also sort of acts like a second email list where if I have an offer or something I want to promote, I can put it into that group of people who are my most dedicated YouTube subscribers who have also joined the group.

And we grew pretty quickly.

We got to like 2000 plus people in a few months.

But last week I canceled my school subscription for a few very important reasons.

Number one, the DM pitching is getting so out of hand.

If you join a single free group with enough people in it, it will not take you long to start getting pitches just like every other platform, except it's more ubiquitous than the case where they're reaching out to everybody, not just people with followings.

And yes, I understand that this is sort of out of school's control.

It's going to happen.

And they actually have made features, which I'm very grateful for, where you can turn off DMs from all communities or certain communities that you're a part of, but then you're kind of cut off from that community in a way, depending on what you want.

I think the main thing that upsets me here is how fast this culture spun up because Sam was part of the internet marketing community and launched to that community.

It's just so quickly that this platform that was supposed to be awesome and not have so much pitching quickly became this pitch fest and like annoying because not only do I get the DMs, I get a million emails about all of the communities I'm in and I get an email every time I get a DM.

And so I have to go configure those notifications.

It's just a lot.

It's pretty annoying.

If you're part of one group and it's a paid group, I'm sure you're not experiencing this, but if you've joined more than one group and just not mess with your notification settings, it is so overwhelming how many emails they send you.

Not fun at all.

And this brings me to number two, which is not only is pitching in the DMs bad, but quote unquote value posts and just comments and other random stuff inside of school groups is so bad.

I even got on the very last post where I announced I was shutting down my school group, I got like, Miss Maria can help you invest in crypto.

Here's my WhatsApp.

Here's my Telegram comments.

Like what is going on here?

This isn't free YouTube videos where bots can come in, but apparently it is now.

And so in my free group, I was getting quote unquote value posts like this all the time where people were just obviously copy pasting the same value into each group and seeing what would happen and then complimenting that with DM sometimes.

And because the DM feature on school says, Hey, you guys know each other from this community.

It's sort of gets pushed back on you.

Like you're more to blame than you would be if you were the owner of a Facebook group, because if somebody DMs you from a Facebook group, you're sort of like, Oh, Facebook's just annoying.

But if someone DMs you from a school group, you're like whoever owns the school group is really annoying and they need to be punished because it tells you again, which school group it came from.

So my advice is if you launch a free community inside school, you have to, have to, have to be on top of moderation, like insanely on top of it more than you would, in my opinion, in a Facebook group, you have to be super careful who you let in and you have to delete and ban people super quickly if anything goes wrong.

Now this brings me to number three, and that is for a free community.

I still think Facebook is far superior, especially if you're in the like internet marketing realm, because so many people are on Facebook anyway, because they're running ads.

That's just so much easier to access your group there, get tagged in there, announce things, promote things.

When it's something that people already check and already have an account in.

One of Sam's arguments for why you should use school is when you create a Facebook group, there's so much noise that people just forget about your group.

But I feel like the opposite, the Facebook groups that I joined tend to show up on my feed a lot.

And I feel kind of like that's the case with school.

Like I join a school group and then I forget about it.

I don't, if I'm getting a million emails, but once I turn those emails off, it's not like I go on to school to check it every single day, like I would with Facebook anyway.

And that leads me to the fourth reason, which is high level is coming out with basically all of school's features.

Apparently in this quarter, Q1 of 2024, Maroon posted some sneak peeks of what they're going to be coming out with.

I'll of course be making a video on it when it comes out, but right now, honestly, the way that GHL has community set up, it does everything I want it to do and they don't have DMs.

And so I can't get a bunch of annoying stuff happening all the time and it's not as engaging and it's actually working to my benefit because only the good stuff is actually getting posted because obviously there's a paid only groups, which also helps, but there's something to be said for just removing and stripping away everything that you don't actually need in there and just having a place for people to ask questions and get answers to questions.

Now, obviously that's my use case for my paid communities.

Maybe you have a different use case for your free community or whatever you're doing.

And in that case, go ahead, use school, go crazy.

I don't care.

But if you're just looking for a place where people can ask and answer questions, I think GHL communities is one of the best ones out there right now or Facebook groups.

But lastly, and this is the real reason I shut down my group is that running a free group is a lot of freaking work first of all, but it's just not something I have the time for right now.

If I didn't have a YouTube channel and I needed a place for people to gather and to be able to promote my stuff and provide value in there, then I would have a free group and I would host it on Facebook, not school for the reasons I've already mentioned.

But because all three of my communities are paid, I have my affiliate community, the guild, and then my inner circle, people are motivated in and of themselves to go post questions.

So I don't have to like force the UI or make it beautiful or do all this gamification.

Like they just want support.

And it's awesome because it lives inside of GHL where I can fire automations, lump it in with my current subscription instead of paying an extra $99 a month for school.

And of course not deal with all of the annoying DMs and value posts.

Bottom line is I'm already providing a ton of value and doing that for free here on YouTube for you guys.

So why don't I just stick to that and focus on that?

And then if somebody joins my affiliate community, they can get a little bit of extra support there.

If they join the guild, they can get personal support from me.

And if they join the inner circle, of course, they have my phone number.

Now, a few other things while we're here that I don't really like about school.

One, you can't even sell your own school community using school really.

Like they don't have funnels or websites.

Like they have payments, but you're not gonna have the flexibility of a landing page builder that you may want to build into your process.

And so you need something like GHL anyway.

I don't like that you can't white label it like I can with my current community, which is community.agencydominance.com.

Beautiful, built on high level.

It looks like my own brand.

Granted the branding here is still kind of being worked on, but it's actually nice that people don't have the network effect in some ways.

Like I don't want somebody to be part of 10 other groups on my domain, them to be part of the one group where they're actually going to get the help that they need instead of getting distracted.

Like the purpose of school was in the first place, but instead of that, people are joining a bunch of groups.

You're getting distracted by a million notifications and emails.

And it's just turning out like expensive Facebook groups basically.

A couple of things I do like about school.

It's actually pretty easy to get discovered in SEO with a good school group that has some good engagement since these are like public web pages if you have a public group.

And I definitely do think they're onto something with the gamification, but you have to really be committed to that whole process of like, this is a free group with gamification in it.

And these are the things that you get for being part of the gamification, et cetera, which again is just not my model.

It may be yours.

And if it is, I probably would go with school or maybe a Facebook group over GHL communities at this point, because it is going to take them a while to get to a hundred percent of what school has built.

Anyway, I'm not saying school is overhyped, but I think it is in many ways.

Anyway, I hope this helps anyone looking for solutions when it comes to where to host their course community, et cetera.

I actually made a video breaking down even more of these platforms like Circle, Kajabi, and some of these other course hosting platforms.

And that'll be listed here if you want to check that out.

If you do, I'll see you on the other side.