How I won the Skool Games w a $335K/mo one-man community

Hey guys, got a quick and easy walk-through for you today all about how I won the school games this quarter. And I did it all with a one-man community that makes over $300,000 a month in total. That little cha-ching you just heard was directly from school. Should probably turn that off before I proceed, or I'm going to be getting that all day. Let me just exit out of that tab.

And basically, what I've done is I've put together a 19-page document that shows you guys how to do it all. I'm going to publish this. You guys can get access to this just down below, uh, this video. You guys can also, if you're part of the schoolers community, see the post. I'm crossing my fingers that Sam and, uh, maybe Andrew and, and Alex and these guys are going to tag it or pin it somewhere to the top. Um, that'd be pretty cool and I think give a lot of visibility on how to run a similar sort of operation.

But basically, what I'm going to do in this video is I'm just going to walk you through all the logic there and then expound upon it. Maybe give you guys some more, um, insight into how to run a successful school community. And I'm making this video today because, oh my goodness, that's way heavier than I thought. The team just sent me over this puppy, which is, uh, very shiny and reflective and way heavier than it looks. And, uh, yeah, it's more or less, you know, the thing that they give to people that hit number one on school for a specific category, I think.

But why don't I just start by walking you guys through some of the logic and then, you know, if I see anything interesting here, I'll, uh, run you guys through it. A repeating theme that you guys are going to see come up throughout this presentation, if you guys can call it that, is just that there really isn't anywhere near as much magic as most people think, in terms of like becoming number one on school. Just takes a lot of activity, just takes a lot of consistency. And, you know, I think a lot of people want that magic secret, that cure-all that, you know, guarantees you number one placement. But in reality, it's just a lot of like the same boring, mundane things that you do over and over and over again for a very long period of time.

Okay. So, yeah, let's run through some context. First thing is I have this community here called Maker School. It's about $300,000 a month right now. And then this one over here called Make Money with Make. It's actually my first community that started well over a year ago, um, that is about $35,000. We also get annual subs, so sometimes that goes between 35 to 55. Uh, I have zero hires for all of this, so no community managers. I do no onboarding calls. Um, in Maker School, I just have one call per week. And it's all extraordinarily time-leveraged. My hourly rate comes out to like several thousand dollars an hour, which I'll run you guys through in a moment. Uh, and then my margins, just given the fact that, you know, I have none of the above, are crazy. So, it's just school fees plus some giveaways that I'm doing inside of Make Money with Make. The whole idea here is I'm building generational wealth with school and basically like an hour and a half a day, which is absolutely ridiculous.

So, thank you to everybody on the school team for putting together the platform and allowing me the opportunity to do this stuff. I tagged a few of them over here, but, you know, rest assured, while these people are in charge of school, they don't make up the whole school team. There are a lot of people whose names I just couldn't find that I wish that I could have added to this list.

Okay, so, um, yeah, I think that there are a lot of limiting beliefs surrounding communities and how they work. So, this is just going to be a brain dump hopefully to eliminate some of those and then to run you guys through, um, a pretty cool paradigm that, you know, I've used to solve problems like school before, as well as a bunch of other things, um, that I think you guys could probably use in your own businesses, in your own lives, maybe see some more success with.

So, yeah, let's just run through what I'd consider the the main principles of school success. Okay.

Okay. So, number one is, uh, very obvious, but it should show up every day. And already I've lost probably like 80% of people that run school communities. Um, 80% or more just don't show up every day. I mean, you know, I'm pulling the stat kind of out of my ass. I've taken like brief little surveys here and there when I was looking to see what was like the key differentiator that I could use that other communities don't have. Um, but it was something like 8 out of 10 people just don't show up every day. And only two out of 10 people actually do some sort of activity.

So here's my activity graph over the course of the last, uh, I don't really know how long it's been, 5 months or so. Um, you can also just see this directly if you go to my profile, go, I think like, um, this one right over here. My activity graph for the better part of the last year is just been all green. I have had one, two, three, four, five, six days out of the last 365 days that I haven't shown up. So basically, if we just math it out, I'm at, um, 359 out of 365, or about 98% show-up rate. Uh, and in the last 5 months, as you guys could see, I haven't missed a single day. The, uh, last time I missed that day was March the 2nd, which was how many days ago was March 2nd? 135 days ago, a little, yeah, just about like four and a half, 5 months ago.

So, uh, showing up every day is really like the number one lever. If there was a single thing that I hope you guys could walk away from this video with, it would just be if you just show up every day for whatever the hell you're doing, whether it's school or something else, you will inevitably win. Um, you know, and if you think about it, like not only do I show up every day, but then the activity is just ridiculous. Just check out the last like 2 or 3 months. I basically average at least 100 to maybe 250. Some days like way more, 400 activities on a daily basis. And I just do it every single day. It's first thing that I do every day, uh, most important thing that I do every day. And yeah, so just given the fact that I outperform the average community owner something like 15 times or so, it's not surprising I make more than 15 times the amount of money, just to be clear. And, um, no secret sauce here, just how it is. You know, if you just show up a lot and you do 15 times the work, well, you shouldn't be expecting 15 times the results because of diminishing returns, you should definitely be expecting to just make more, right?

So, the thing that I really dislike is, um, so many community owners will make these amazing communities and they'll put a lot of time and energy in at the beginning and then they'll just like discard them all. They'll just throw them away completely, um, and then they'll just try passing them off to some lower-level community manager. And while I get the idea behind it, right, work on the business, not in the business, the the core idea of a community product, I think if you are, um, organic like I am, right? Like I have my YouTube channel, I have Instagram, these are organic content channels that people find me on, tend to like what I'm saying, and then try and, you know, purchase a paid product from me after. Like, if it's a community that is built around you, isn't the most important thing that you should just show up every day and just be in the community?

So, I don't want to pass that off to somebody else because it's like a market of one. It's me, right? I'm the only person that could recreate me. So, why the hell would I ever try and pass that off to somebody else? Um, it just doesn't make sense.

So, yeah, responding to school posts takes me about an hour and a half a day and it makes me over $300,000 a month. If you, if you go to like an hour and a half a day because 45 hours, um, per month approximately, just responding. If we go 335 divided by, uh, what did I just say? 45. I make about $7,444 an hour. Like, it's stupid. Why the hell wouldn't you make that money? Is there really anything else that is more important than this for you? Like, sure, working on the business might make you, I don't know, $500 an hour, $1,000 an hour depending on where you are in your career, but like, yeah, like, is there anything that is making even close to seven grand an hour? At least in my case, no. So obviously this is what I'm doing all day, or at least, um, to the extent that I can.

So, there's some other benefits of showing up every day. I mean, it reduces churn like crazy. It leads to massive goodwill that you could very easily use to upsell people on later. Gives you constant 24/7 exposure to the actual problems that people in your community are facing, which I think is really important. Um, and then it also allows you to lead by example because the more that you engage, typically the more everybody else is going to engage. It becomes this positive feedback loop, this knock-on effect which significantly improves the culture of the group. So, you know, it also delivers that $7,444 an hour now, but then it pays me dividends more in the future just given the fact that I'm planting little seeds every time I engage. I'm building relationships every time I engage. I can upsell these people over the course of the next few months or years, um, because of this engagement and so on.

Okay. So, yeah, I mean, like that's hopefully the logic behind why you should show up every day. I don't really think I needed necessarily to run you guys through in in such excruciating detail, but, um, you know, if you just show up every day, you're going to do way better than the vast majority of school owners.

Now, the main question that I get at this point is, um, well, you have 3,300 people or something like that across both your communities that are subscribed to you, so how the hell do you actually do that yourself? And certainly, how the hell do you do that in an hour and a half a day? And I think it's a great question, but, um, I just want you guys to like, you know, I want you guys to, I guess, realize that that question in and of itself is like the wrong question to ask. Have you guys ever actually tried to ask yourself how much time a single community member takes to manage? Or is it just like you guys see the 3,000 or whatever and you guys like, "Oh my goodness, this is crazy." Most people haven't actually done the math.

But, um, if you just take the total number of members you have and the theoretical total amount of time it takes to respond to every post on a daily basis, you can actually do a little bit of math and you can figure out per member of my community, how much time am I going to have to spend. This is what I did. So I took, um, I timed myself. I responded to all of my posts every single day for a few days and it was like a week or something. And then I divided my total member count by the average daily time spent and then determined my daily time investment per person. So before you guys get all up in arms about like, my god, you like your, you know, this is super crazy. How the hell are you managing 3,300 people? When my community was a lot smaller, then I ran this test and then I just determined that on average it takes me about 0.0221 minutes per member per day to respond to my posts. So that is now like a core fundamental principle that I know leading into my community. It's going to take me about 0.02 minutes per member per day. So if I have 10 members, it's going to take me about 2 minutes. If I have a per day, if I have 100 or 100 members, it's going to take me about 2 minutes per day. I just scaled it up from there. Like it's, you know, pretty logical if you think about it that way, right?

So, viewed in this way, responding to everything myself is really not that big of a deal. And, um, yeah, when I realized this, I was like, "Oh, yeah, you know, there's no reason why I need to hire it because I could continue scaling this up until like probably 8,000 members or so." Took me a few days to figure it out. My initial time spent was definitely way higher, but yeah, that's that's really the math here.

You guys got to keep in mind that not every person in the community is like an active contributor engager in the community. Like obviously we wish that everybody was, but not everybody is like actually making like a few posts a day. Like most things in life, it's longtail. It's power law, right? Like you have like 1% of people in the community that make like 80% of posts or something. Okay? It's like the 80/20 Pareto principle if you guys, um, know about that. So, yeah, makes perfect sense that you could manage like massive community sizes, much bigger than you guys actually realistically think, so long as you set it up right. And, um, here's how I set it up right. Here's basically everything that I do that you guys can copy and feel free to implement in your own.

Okay, so first I batch everything. So I respond in batches every 24 hours approximately. I do it entirely in one sitting. I try not to spread it out over the course of the day because, uh, I, I went to school for behavioral neuroscience and a big thing that, you know, you learn about human behavior and productivity when you're in it, when you're in that program is context switching is really, really the main cost in most people's ability to get [ __ ] done in a day. Like if you are doing something and then you see a notification pop up and then you go and you do the notification, then you come back and do the thing, you just added like an additional 5 to 10 minutes to the entire process. Even if the notification only took you 30 seconds to respond to and the thing you're doing took you 30 seconds to do, like just the fact that you are switching your attention from one thing to another is extraordinarily destructive.

So all I do is I just like I batch it, right? I, uh, put some sunglasses on, lock myself in the closet, and I just say, "All right, it's school time." And then I just sit down and I bang through it all. You guys can think of this sort of like an email inbox, right? Like the number one recommendation in, you know, like CEOs and stuff like that is like, do your email first thing in the morning. Bang it out, inbox zero, and don't look at it for the rest of the day unless something is super incredibly urgent. Do you know what I mean? Like the only time you're going to do that is if you are sending an email. Like the only time I'm getting on school is if I am creating a piece of content to give back to people. But for the most part, like I do all of my work up front. Takes me about that hour and a half, and then, okay, cool. I'm done. I've now given and created a bunch of content. I can let it like run free and run wild and let the school community algo, you know, bump it up or bump it down.

Um, I also use voice transcription tools like Aqua and Whisper Flow, etc., instead of typing. So, uh, the way that this works is basically the average person types at about 40 words per minute. The average person speaks at about 160 words per minute. Check that out. Right? Um, that's a 4x gap. So, in total, it's about three to four times the bandwidth, aka the total number of like bits that you could send through a little wire. And then I also find that because I'm speaking into this transcription tool, the text ends up coming off a lot more conversational, which I think is important because at the end of the day, that's what people care about, your authentic voice. Doubly so in my case, because like most people are here from my YouTube, right? So because of this, I can respond a lot faster than most other people and I can bang out like, you know, a certain number of posts in a much shorter period of time than somebody with like, you know, uh, somebody that's clanking on the keys manually. Definitely takes some getting used to. When you figure it out, it is it is abundantly, um, more powerful.

The next big thing is I batch all of my categories. So, it's mostly the same sort of post over and over and over again. So, I'll show you guys what I mean by that. Like, I have a bunch of categories in Maker School. One's an introductions category, right? This just lists a bunch of people that just introed, but I also have like a general discussion category. Then, I have, um, I don't know, a daily accountability updates category. I have bugs and automation QA category. Now, obviously my niche is, uh, more development-related because I'm AI and automation. So, a lot of these are like systems diagnoses and stuff like that. I'm good at, I'm good at that, but, uh, I just run through top to bottom and then when I do my daily batch, I'll actually just open up all intro posts, go unread, and then just answer all of the ones that are unread. And I focus on the new posts. And that's kind of like a meta system here that just allows me to do this much faster and better and more organized, um, than than most other people.

Okay. So, um, once I'm done with the intros, I'm basically just saying, "Hey man, welcome aboard to the community, bro. Oh, it's so great to have you. Super stoked to see you here. Like, thanks so much. You know, if anybody's a cool background that I think could be hyper relevant, like I'll mention, I'll bring it up." Um, then I just move on to the next one. Now, I'm doing bugs and it's like, hey, I think this bug is this. Hey, I think this bug is that. The reason for this is, uh, it comes back to that context switching idea, which, um, you know, I've just come to realize is at the root of so much of like my productivity. If you just batch everything and you just stay in the same context, like if you're in intro mode and then you just go through a bunch of intros and then you switch to bug hunt mode and then you go through a bunch of bug hunt and then you switch to daily updates mode and you go to daily update, uh, uh, finish your daily update stack, you minimize the number of like fixed attentional shifts and then it just ends up making you way more productive.

So, yeah, to make a long story short, just batch everything. It's so, so much better. And then with this, I can respond to about one post a minute. Meaning that if there's like, you know, 70 posts in Maker School, I can respond to 70 posts in like a little over an hour, which is pretty crazy. I don't do old posts. So, if somebody asks me follow-up questions, uh, I just encourage them to create a new thread, which lets me filter very easily by unreads. Now, school did not used to have this unread feature, which has been just a total game changer for me. I used to have to do this manually, and when I did, you guys see how some of these have these little circles around them, right? Well, what I would do is I would basically grab, um, like the circle in HTML and then I would use a little Chrome extension that would cycle through all of them, copy the links to my clipboard, and then I just go to like a little tool and then paste them all in.

Another big thing is like, uh, you know, because I am so hyper-engaged and I do it all, you know, one per once per day in a batch. Essentially, what what this allows me to do is the people that see my posts and stuff get inspired themselves and they start helping other people in the community, which I think is fantastic and extraordinarily important. But because I don't check until the next 24 hours, by the time that I come back and check, a lot of the questions will have already been answered by the helpful engaged members of the community that have already suffered the same problem as the person that's posting and know how to solve it. So then what do I do? I don't actually have to go through the whole rigmarole of like debugging the innate end flow or whatever. I just chime in with a little thumbs up. I just say, "Dude, sick." Or I post a funny gift or whatever. This probably saves me like half an hour. And then the benefit is the person that was doing the engaging, you know, gets rewarded like publicly by me because I'm telling everybody else how awesome they are. You know, if we're, if we're honest, school is like a social marketplace, right? Like there are people that are bigger whales and then they're smaller fish and stuff. And this helps people like climb the the social hierarchy in a way. Um, and then obviously since a lot of people join because of me, they obviously really value my feedback and my engagement. So that little bit of personalized attention just makes them more likely to do it. Um, and then, yeah, uh, you know, I, I basically respond to pretty much every thread in Maker School, which massively increases engagement. And then that massive increase engagement just helps everything else and just makes it so much more of like a tight-knit community, which I think is very valuable.

So, you know, I think a lot of people can go super far just by doing this sort of stuff once per day. Um, I think that running a great community is a lot less about fancy strategy and really cool funnels and all the tactics that I have people hitting me up in the DMs for every day. It's literally just like brute force caveman engagement, just show up every day for a very long period of time. And just like anything, your business, uh, relationships, the companies that you run, etc. If you just do this for long enough, you will inevitably succeed. School is no exception to that. But I mean, you can apply the same idea to more or less everything.

So, you know, I'm going to be speaking at the school games in a few days. Um, and I'm going to put together some fancy little, you know, chart thing presentation and I'm, I'm thinking of just doing this and then, you know, it's going to be like, well, what's the secret? What did Nick do that, you know, none of us did? I'm just going to point to this and be like, well, I just showed up every day and average like 200 activities a day for like 300 days, you know, which is what, 60,000 pieces of activity. You add that up, you zoom out a little bit. Yeah. 60,000 pieces of activity, $300,000 a month. Yeah. That's like $5 per month per activity. Um, anyway, that's the big thing. Okay, that's the one thing that I want you guys to walk away from. If you guys walk away from this video with that, then it will outshadow everything else that I'm about to tell you. And I want you to know that what I'm about to tell you will seem really sexy and cool and unique and fun, um, and really genius or whatever, like it may hopefully, but that's not actually the 80/20. The 80/20 is what I just talked about. Okay, just showing up every day. Okay, so that's that's strategy number one.

Strategy number two, should probably get this in the shot, huh? Strategy number two that enabled me to get this giant hunk of metal, which is extraordinarily heavy and I need to polish it off. Clearly my hands are kind of oily, uh, is turning a B2C promise into a B2B promise. Okay. So I don't know, um, you know, if everybody here knows what the terms mean, but B2C, business to consumer. So you're targeting, uh, mostly just individuals that don't own businesses. B2B, business to business, you're targeting primarily business owners. So when you're targeting primarily business owners, they tend to speak business language like you. And you start to be able to level with them on terms like ROI, return on investment, and so on and so forth.

So the logic here is, um, you know, one of the reasons I was able to grow so quickly is because of my niche, right? AI, automation, that sort of stuff. But, uh, I do have a lot of people that just look at Maker School from the outside and they see the term AI somewhere and they're like, "Oh, it's an AI community. That's why he won." And it's like, um, that's it. You know, they, they kind of like see that and then that confirms their pre-existing belief that like some niches are really easy and other niches are really hard and they just stopped thinking about it. And I get where you're coming from, but, uh, that's wrong. Like basically objectively wrong. Uh, cuz I didn't just pick this niche. I didn't just fall into it. Like I, I purposefully created the niche that I'm in. And it's not a niche that everybody else is occupying. It's not that this is an AI community. It's my own community with my own market.

So the reason why Maker School works so well and the reason why we just crushed in this is because we took what was formerly B2C, which is AI education, and then I intentionally converted it into a B2B market, which was AI for money, in particular. I niched down so hard that it was AI for getting your first paying customer in 90 days or your money back. So there are levels to this, right? Like AI is kind of like down here and it's like, what's the outcome there? It's like, oh, you'll learn about no code and AI and technology. Then there's AI for money, and it's like, okay, what's the outcome there? Oh, you'll learn about how to make money with AI. And then there's AI for getting your first paying customer in 90 days or your money back. And it's like, what's the outcome there? Well, it's that you'll get your first paying customer in 90 days or your money back. Like, it's extraordinarily clear, right? So, instead of just making it about something general, which is about the cool technology and whatnot, I made it hyper-relevant to people that wanted to grow in business. And guess what? The people that want to grow a business tend to understand more the math of return on investment. And because nothing in life is free, let alone certainly not Maker School, um, that made it a lot easier for me to to have people justify their investment and basically immediately return some sort of ROI, and that's the whole idea.

So another way of looking at it is my offer is not become an expert with AI like most other people's in my space. It is get your first paying customer for an AI service. So the cool thing is I am not actually about AI. I am AI adjacent, which allows me to benefit from the newness of AI and the excitement around it. But AI is not like the core thing. The core thing is get your first paying customer in 90 days. Just happens to be with AI. Do you know what I mean? So because of this, I was able to craft this market of one idea and then also do like a pretty unique offer. I want to make it clear that I was not like the first on the scene by any means with AI. It's not like I was, you know, I came at like the good time with undifferentiated, just bland AI communities and then I was able to grow. There were already lots of AI communities when I made my AI community. Um, I just like really niched the hell down. And, you know, in order to win in school, I think that you do need to niche the hell down. But don't just like niche down as in like talk about something vague, esoteric, you know, like, our community is about medieval history from 1459 to 1512. It's like, no, no, no, make it a B2B problem, um, that solves something that people are actually justifiably willing to invest some money in, and then you'll win, right?

So, yeah, that's my recommendation for you guys. You know, if you guys are doing knitting or something, don't do learn about knitting, you know, instead do learn how to make money with knitting because then the people that purchase your program or course or community or whatever will think, well, this thing is $15 a month. But, you know, if I get good at making money with knitting, I'll make like $1,500 bucks a month, and the community would be 100 times ROI, right? Ideally, it would actually be not even that. It'd be get the specific monetary outcome with knitting. So, be like, you know, make $1,000 a month with your knitting business working five hours, five hours a week or something, right? That would be the ideal.

Okay. All right. Hopefully you guys have appreciated this so far. This is kind of blurry. Maybe we'll move this a bit. I don't know if I'll be able to get this in the shot, right? Okay. Why don't we just put this right by my face? Um, the third thing is to launch first and then build later. Now, this is pretty obvious, I think, at this point, and most people probably understand where I'm coming from, especially fellow people on the school leaderboards. But the real prerequisite is actually just launching a community in the first place. Like, a lot of people that are watching me here, probably 90% of them, um, that might be interested in launching a school community, just sit around on the sidelines watching other people win.

But you are very limited in what you can do unless you consciously and intentionally and repeatedly step into the arena. You know, it's one thing to watch a gladiatorial battle and throw tomatoes at the people inside, and it's another thing to actually have sit there with your gladius and fight the lion, right? So if you are not making a decision right now, then that is a decision. You have made a decision to not make a decision. It may not be a conscious one, but it is still a decision at the end of the day, and as a result, you still face the responsibilities of making a decision. It's it's an opportunity cost, and it's massive. Every day that you don't do the thing that you wanted to do is basically like almost near infinite downside. I mean, you're you're losing thousands of dollars a day, hell thousands of dollars a minute by not being the best opportunity, by not taking the best opportunities that you can.

So that's how I frame it. Um, if you just frame your business life is every day that you do not act, you are costing yourself some amount of money, uh, you will go a lot farther because human beings are just naturally biased towards fearing loss more than we are enjoying upside. So, um, I launched super quick and I consider one of the main reasons why I was able to get out of my own way and then focus on the things that actually matter, uh, which are daily actionables like engaging with my community members.

I'm just going to give you guys the playbook here, tell you guys everything that I did. Uh, I'm not going to say this is perfect. I think I probably could have streamlined some of these, but this is what I did. Feel free to, you know, take a look at this and copy it. So, first thing I did was I created a blank community meatly. I paid the school fee. I think it's $97 a month. I certainly hope it is. Um, I know that they launched another plan recently, but anyway, I paid the school fee, which at the time was somewhere around $100 a month. Um, that just pre-committed me. Like, I didn't actually want to do a community if I'm honest. I wasn't very familiar with the business model. And obviously, people don't like doing things that they're not super familiar with, right? Like we're scared of new, of newness. And, um, I kind of recognized that myself and then I said, "All right, screw it, I'm just going to spend $100 on this." And the reason why is because I'm very cheap. And if I spend $100 on something, I don't just want to like spend $100 on something and go, "Oh my god, I just pissed that away." I want to spend $100 on something like, you know, like many of the business owners that join Maker School see a return on investment.

So I then spent about 20 minutes making some assets on Canva. Uh, I went for a very simple white-on-black font. Uh, it's just like the Maker School logo. So guess see this thing over here? Um, these I made all in like 20 minutes or so. U the cool thing that I've come to realize about design is, um, you know, you can intentionally be minimalistic as a way to like hide your lack of design skills and like I didn't want to hire a designer or a team. I didn't want to AI generate my backgrounds and stuff because I thought it was kind of tacky. Uh, so what I did is I just like used minimalism and I made it all super simple, and I think people just like think I'm a great designer because of it, but I'm not.

Anyway, my first program was called 14-day agency. And the idea with the 14-day agency is that, uh, I didn't actually have the program, like I didn't have the full program recorded when I launched the community. I had like the first day or two recorded. And the idea was I would launch it. People would come in, they'd watch the first video, I'd be like, "Hey, how'd you like the first video? What kind of questions did you have?" Then I'd take that knowledge and then I just use that to record the second video. Eventually, I came up with a curriculum, and that was fine. But yeah, like the real core of this was I recorded for about 2 hours or so and then I was like, "All right, I think I'm done with my classroom, at least before the launch. Thank you to whoever else joined. I really got to close these tabs."

Um, you know, then I was trying to grow like a Twitter at the time and I had like a thousand followers or something and some people were engaging with me. Most of it was just rage bait post stuff, to be honest. But, um, this is before my brand. Well, I guess in the middle of my brand. So, I invited my top followers on Twitter and then, um, people from YouTube that had expressed interest in paying something, um, at some point in time over the course of the last couple months. And I basically just said, "Hey, uh, you know, I'm, I'm considering launching this like paid product. Uh, I know it's totally out of left field, but like you're really smart and I really value your opinion. Would there be any chance that you could, you could find it in your heart to join? Um, I'm not going to ask anything from you. I'm just, you know, I just want you to make an introduction post and then like walk me through what you think about it." And if there's something that I could do in return for you, then let me know.

So, I just sent like 20 people this message, which I had written templated and customized a little bit. And then I had like 20 people in my community on on day one, which is pretty sick. And then obviously a bunch of these people introduce themselves and, um, I made sure to like seed the community with a bunch of people that like were just like making a lot of money as well. Because I wanted the impression when people joined, like the first organic person who joined, to be like, "Holy [ __ ] these guys are killers, right? This is like a core small little nugget of people that are around Nick that like know how to make money. I'm glad I paid. Uh, maybe I should get my friends in here, right?" So that's what I did.

And then I made the group public and then I priced it really low to start. Like I priced my first community, Make Money with Me, at $208 a month. Um, you know, I was not the biggest YouTube channel in my space by any means. Um, but, uh, you know, I am the most monetized and a big chunk of the reason why. Shiny. Big chunk of the reason why is because, um, you know, I just, yeah, I, I launched and then I like successively and consistently raised prices after. Um, obviously this helped a lot because when you start with a really low price point, there are some supply and demand economics that are at play. This also kind of did shoot me in the foot a little bit because I ended up with a bunch of people that I would consider not very serious people. Guys have ever seen Succession? Um, yeah, not serious people. That's kind of the vibe that I had. Uh, because they just didn't really take anything that I was saying seriously and then they, you know, started raising some issues with the community and stuff like that. So, I eventually had to politely ask them if they were either willing to pay more money or get the hell out of here. Uh, so, you know, there's some issues with pricing too low to start. In hindsight, if I could go back in time, I'd probably have priced like double this. So, somewhere around like $50 or $60 a month, just to eliminate like the total tower kicker people that are always asking you to justify every 30 cents that they spend, which is understandable, is what it is. When you, when your core niche is beginners, obviously you're going to get a lot of that, right?

And then, yeah, I just like changed the links on my community and then I launched it and then it was great. So, I never hard pitched anywhere. Uh, always soft pitched. Content strategy more generally on my end for YouTube has always just been 99% value, 1% ask. As I mentioned, I'm not the biggest YouTuber in my space. Um, by subscriber count by any means. There are a lot of people that are much bigger than me in the niche. Um, but I am certainly the highest dollar per subscriber right now. Like well, like we're talking multiples on basically everybody that I can think of off the top of my head. And, uh, yeah, I attribute the reason for that because I just don't sell, whereas, you know, a lot of other people try and sell. I've experimented with selling. A couple of my recent videos I tried selling. Haven't seen any positive results from it. So, I'm just going to go back to not selling at all.

When I mean not selling, I mean like legitimately like the number one, uh, lever that I pulled from Maker School for a while was just like telling people that I had a paid program because just nobody knew about it because I wasn't ever doing call to actions or whatever. People would find out through comments on YouTube and stuff like that and then they'd be like, "My god, Nick has a paid program. Gez, he never talked about it at all." Um, yeah. I mean, it's not ideal, but a lot of people had to like fight to join my program. Nick, I just realized you created a program and I don't see a signup page anywhere. You know, I'm just sending an email like, I'd really like to join. Um, when you don't sell right away, you build up like this the dry tinder of anticipation and when you end up doing the dropping and informing your community or informing your audience or whatever, that tends to blow up really quickly. So, that's at least that's the way that I see it.

So, yeah. Um, eventually I added a weekly community call and then I started slowly increasing the price of the group because if you think about it, every week we had one additional week's worth of recordings, which is like an asset, right? You can transcribe that, you could turn that into text post, you can do a lot with that. It's like knowledge. So every week I, I basically increased the price for a little bit. This is at least for Make Money with Make, um, until I hit my cap, uh, at the time, which was about $500, and then I said, okay, I'm going to like back off for a little bit and like do some more strat strategy. So, yeah, I mean, you know, like increasing the price over time, obvious churn reduction mechanism. I highly recommend that, you know, if you guys are doing this sort of price increase thing, you do it gradually, you do it fairly, you increase it conccom commitment with the value of the program that you are creating. But, uh, yeah, in a nutshell, I think as long as you have like, I don't know, like 30% of these basics down, you can launch a community probably in the next day and you could totally crush it. So this is just a box that you should check and my earnest recommendation for you guys is you just check that box as quickly as possible. Don't think about it too much. Okay. The question that you should answer isn't how do I get this 100% right today? It's how can you set yourself up with a habit that lets you do this 80% right every single day for a full year. And that's the real beast that you need to tackle. Um, so I would just launch immediately, have a really crappy product and then just make it successfully better every day.

Okay, next up, I want to talk community structure. Again, just to reiterate, this is not why my community has been so successful. I'd actually consider my community structure one of the worst parts of the community, but it works pretty well for me. So to start, um, calls. Uh, these are all of the calls on my July calendar. So, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. I guess there's like seven, six or seven calls. I mean, I'm seeing eight here, but this is just because the way the month broke down. Normally, we don't have five in a week and then three in a week. Uh, sorry, five in a month and then three in a month. Normally, it's like, you know, six or seven. So, for the vast majority of Maker School's lifespan, I only did one call per month. That was it. So, I literally erase all of these and then there's just one monthly community call. I did it on the first day of the month. It was like two and a half hours long and it was just like me spitballing, answering as many questions as humanly possible as quickly as possible.

So, the reason for that was because I realized that most community members just didn't join them and I didn't really want to, you know, do a bunch of work for people that weren't going to actually show up. If you looked at the actual call recordings and, um, you know, on YouTube you could see the views of a video, right? How or on Loom or whatever, you can do that too. Uh, very few people are actually seeing them. So, I don't know, some of my videos got like 100 views, but then there's like a thousand people in the community. So, it's like 10% of people are actually watching this. It's kind of silly. So, the reason for this is the time that you spend doing calls is not equally distributed time that trickles down to everybody in the group. To make a long story short, um, you know, in my case, maybe 20% of the group actually shows up to a call. Maybe maybe 10, 10 to 20% depending on the size. So, your thoughts are basically just why spend an hour servicing 20% when you could spend an hour servicing 100%? Um, and when I say like, you know, why do this versus that, the that is text post, right? Like that's why I have such an emphasis on text post all the time. Why spend an hour servicing 20% of my group with a video or a call when I could spend, you know, an hour

Servicing 100% of my group with text posts? It's not 100% in fairness, but like if you think about it, like the value of a text post doesn't go down as much as the value of recording does. Cuz in most people's eyes, it's like a it's like a car. Second you drive it off the lot, value of a of a of a of a live call or whatever plummets because you weren't there. But text posts tend to just like stand the test of time. And um, yeah, they're valuable as valuable today as they are in like six months.

There's some additional issues to calls. They're synchronous obviously that requires logistics and planning. They're um often not very information dense and then you have to deal with a lot of things on the fly which just makes you a poor performer. I would say just don't really think it's the highest value thing that you could be doing with your time. So my two cents to most the people on on the school games zooter board, most of the people that were competing with me last month and you know maybe want to launch uh community soon and like make it to number one this next quarter um are just like reallocate your expected time from calls to forums. If you just like get in the habit of answering questions um more so than like doing calls that only 5 or 10% of people actually attend, I think you're going to have a lot more energy. I think you're going to have a lot better engagement and I think that the UX for the average community member is going to be a lot better.

I also think, and this is just me being like my little uh nerdy AI self, but I also think there's just so much more value in text lease right now because you can very soon instantly index all of the text posts that you've ever written, feed that into AI, and then have AI do some sort of logic decision-m for you, chatbot, whatever.

Okay, so um yeah, since then I've added way more people, right? Like this is back when my community is like a,000 people or 1,200 people or something like that. Now that it's near 3,000, I now do a weekly call and then one of my friends and sales trainers named Connor comes in every two weeks for a hands-on sales session uh where he actually does like live sales roleplay and stuff. Connor is an absolute goat. One of the smartest, most consistent guys that I've chatted about in the space. Um, so much love for that and uh yeah, averages out to something like six calls per month with that. Okay, so four for me and then two from him.

In terms of what I actually do on the call, I mute everybody. So I am God emperor on the call. Okay, I'm the giant worm in Dune. I hide everybody's faces, hide their profile pics, and then I just force everybody to ask a question in a chat. Terms like what the chat looks like. It's uh I don't know if my community call is Oh, yeah, right over here. It's right over here. So, weekly community call thread. I post some funny GIF of a professor. I say get those cues in and then a bunch of people just ask me questions underneath. So, in that way, I basically just get to go down those questions. Um, and then I don't have to like deal with distractions like I don't know somebody's aunt yelling in the background or like a dog barking or the thunderstorm or some person that like lacks the social acuity to know when is not a good time to talk, you know, just like monopolize the conversation, right? So that's my thoughts on it. Um, are they the most fun and the most engaging? Probably not as a result of that, but they're a little more information dense. Um, and then yeah, like to me that's the 8020 basically.

So what do I do instead? I do Looms. Okay, you guys know Loom videos. Little app that you can record uh videos on asynchronously, send it to somebody, and then they can watch it later simply with a link. You don't have to use Loom. There's a variety of different platforms that you can use, but Loom's probably like the most recognized, at least at the time of this recording. And basically what I do instead is it's the 8020. Um, instead of me being live physically on a call where I answer one dude's question in front of 50 or 100 people, I answer people's specific questions in a loom, then I post it and then if somebody else is suffering from that problem, they can just watch that loom video and self-select into actually spending the time. So, I think it's way more efficient. And then the benefit to that is looms are way more scalable because now I don't have to be in a place at a specific point in time. So, look, if I have 2 minutes, I could totally just like bang out a quick loom for somebody. The recipient can watch it at 1.5 times speed, which so it's even more respectful of their time. And because my whole community basis is all about getting [ __ ] done and helping you do so, um, you don't spend as much time consuming content at 1x or whatever when you could be doing it way faster. And then you also get like that little hit of interacting with me physically, but then I don't have to, you know, if you think about it, like listen until the end of your question, which most of the time is not going to be like the best way to phrase the question anyway. You know what I mean? Like I will get to assume and interpret and infer and then answer more or less everything for you in one shot which is just much more time efficient for both of us. It's way better. It solves so many of the needs that a call does. Um, but now I just have like a library and then yeah you know since the information density of a loom is really high. I refer to them weeks or months down the line. It's not uncommon for me to like comment and then reference a loom that I recorded like 3 or 4 months ago cuz you know that information is still relevant. Tends to be very high information density and it's like the best solution for that specific impression. And then most of my many of my Loom videos have tens of thousands of views now. Not most of them, most of them have like probably 10 or 15 views, but many of my Loom videos have actually gone like super viral, not just within the community, but guaranteed people have been like sharing them outside of them because yeah, I clicked on one uh that was about I think cold email setup or something. I think it had like 30 or 40,000 views. So, it's not the case for my longer 1 hour call recordings. If you guys check out like the view count on one of those things, it's like 100, you know, 100 from like a year ago. And it's like, wow, only 100 people actually sat down to watch that thing. Talk about like poor utilization my time. So, those are my thoughts on it.

Next up, um, categories. I've never really thought super hard about it. Probably sub-optimal. Um, but yeah, I have like general, which I think is valuable. I have uh announcements, which is valuable. I got like bugs, um, introductions, right? The most important category for me though is wins. So, that's what I'm going to spend the bulk of my time on. To make a long story short, wins is just a channel where you brag a little bit. You talk about why what you did worked and how you did some win. So, Jake uh makes $11,000 bucks per month. He's doing it part-time. Mark secured $21,000 in revenue. Adam had four contracts in four days. Jimmy closed $4,150 bucks this month. You know, if you think about it from like a beginner's perspective, these are all massive limiting beliefs that like most beginners have when they join a beginner program. It's like, hey, does this actually work? Can I actually do this? Am I cut out for this stuff? Is there some element that other people have that I'm lacking? The benefit to having like a wins category and then just making sure it's populated as hell all the time with people that actually have wins is you're just breaking those limited beliefs constantly. People see other members that join at approximately the same time as them like now making $4,000 per month and they're like, "Holy crap, I can actually do this. He did it. I'm better than that guy at this. And if he's doing it, then I can do it." Right? Which is obviously what you want to incite. And this isn't even like I'm not even talking strategy from like a community uh manager here or founder. I'm talking like this helps people actually win because when you're surrounded by a culture of success constantly significantly improves the probability that you are going to have that success too. You just become normalized to it. You know, it's just not that big of a deal to be successful. So yeah, wins are essential. Um, it's peak showing not telling. It's not me being like, "Yeah, this works. You should pay more money." It's like, "No, no, man." like look at all these other people that are saying it works and saying how grateful they are to have had the opportunity to join this program and spend money on it cuz they've delivered a crazy ROI. And then yeah, you know, like anytime somebody sends me a DM thanking me, which happens pretty often, um I'll just say, "Hey man, like dude, thanks so much for this. Would you mind sharing a win?" Just share the wins thread. Usually the ones that work best or I made this much amount of money in this amount of time and then they do it because obviously they like me and they consider me one of the reasons why they were successful. The really cool part about this too is like if you go to the wins thread uh wins category rather, there's just like non-stop like user journeys from people that started their very first day ever that are now making like what most people consider silly boatloads of money and having like literally just testimonial after testimonial after testimonial. Not only is it a really cool asset obviously, but yeah, you just have like this awesome standalone resource where you get a whole list of people that go through struggles, ask questions that you may be wondering the answers to, throw a bunch of stuff at the wall, and then finally something sticks, and then they're making more money than like 90% of people.

So, what I do is I take these wins posts that come in all the time, and they do come in all the time. They're they're pretty often. It's like every few hours. So Allan did 3 hours ago. Raton did 4 hours ago. Sebastian did 6 hours ago. Richard did 22 hours ago. I mean, what's that, like four or five posted in a day, something like that. Some days we get way more. Some days we get like 10. Other days we get like three or four. But what I do is I just pin them and then I have them on like the front page. So when people sign up to my community, the first thing they see is like, "Holy crap, this this actually works. People are like making money." And they click on it and then they see the people's descriptions and so on and so forth. So that was that was obviously super cool, super hack. um quite the hack. Um I didn't learn this from anybody. I just kind of thought about it for myself like what would I want to see if I was a newbie and uh yeah kind of like a first principles approach to it. I don't think a lot of people are doing this but I try and basically always occupy two out of the three pinned posts with wins.

Next up is the onboarding. So my onboarding is pretty simple, pretty straightforward. There's not a lot going on uh to be honest. And you know what I do is I consider this the 8020 that allows me to leverage my time as effectively as possible. I know a lot of people here are doing like daily onboarding calls, weekly onboarding calls, stuff like that. While it does decrease your turn, I'm sure. Um I I think it's like marginal per unit time spent. I don't really think it's the best usage of my time. So, as somebody who's always had the goal of running this puppy solo, I have other things that I consider higher priority. Um, so, what I do is I just offload all this to to that welcome thread that encourages people to make an intro post, comment on some posts, go through a big list of member wins I pre-compiled, and then start on the pre-program. Here it is. Basically, just read through the pre-program onboarding, find three comments and posts, and then respond to them. Sign up to my discount aggregator for $21 grand and free tools and discounts. This is obviously an immediate ROI and it makes people a lot more likely to stick. And then, you know, post and wins when you win and and stuff like that. That's that's kind of the main juice. I've added slowly to this over time like with the affiliate offer and stuff, but the affiliate offer isn't really working super well for me. So, I may remove that. I'm not entirely sure. Or I may have found a different way to advertise that. Um, but yeah, in reality, I think you just need three or four things. If you think about it, like, you know, when you comment on other posts as a newbie, what you're doing is you're like creating many relationships in the first few hours, which is greatly increasing stickiness. And the benefit here is it's not a mini relationship with me, you know, somebody that like runs the group who's obviously incentivized to like want you to create a mini relationship with me because I'm going to sell you on more [ __ ]. It's like you create many relationships with other people that are curious, maybe a little worried, that have the same issues as you, and now you feel like you're in a team, which is really powerful. So, I think it's 8020. Um, now as I've gotten bigger and inevitably lost the niche underdog status, the churn has definitely increased. So, I may implement some sort of more rigorous onboarding at some point, but again, like I do just want to continue running this solo. Um, I'm pretty happy with where I'm at, so we'll see.

Okay, classroom. This is what my classroom looks like. You guys already saw that. So, very simple, very straightforward, very minimalistic. Um, the whole part about daily daily accountability in Maker School is just that like I basically just force you to show up every day with the idea that like if you come to Maker School every single day and then I force you to like, you know, do the thing that day, you're more likely to like ask questions and engage in the community, give people updates on where you're going and stuff like that and then it'll just improve engagement which will allow me to continue operating this mostly autonomously just on my own. So I kind of baked all that in like from first principles, right? So the whole idea is you just show up every day. If you show up every day for long enough, you're significantly more likely to actually succeed. And then also, you're significantly more likely to actually post stuff. And then if you do both, then I win, too. So, yeah. Um, I've distilled the same idea that I mentioned to you guys earlier, but showing up every day to the to the members of my program. And I think it's like one of the most effective ways to structure any sort of business program. So, I'd recommend it. Um, so all of my classroom modules and stuff are like like month one, day one, month one, day two, month one, day three, and then I just like have daily tasks that I foresee you to do. So we have three tasks in day one here. Operating name, buy and main domain, and a set of cold email. That's like what you do on day one. Day two, you select niches, you do something else, you do something else. And then yeah, the whole idea is you just do every day on a schedule. Um, so there's a benefit to this financially speaking, strategically as well. Uh, when I say, you know, you have to show up every day. I don't want you to skip ahead. And then people don't skip ahead. Well, then they stay longer because the program takes longer than most people would otherwise anticipate. So many people at the beginner stage just want to jump into a program or a course or or a community then just consume everything voraciously and then you know get information overload and then quit. If you think about it, that doesn't really help me and then it doesn't really help you either. Doesn't help me because I don't make as much money as I could have off of you. And then it doesn't help you because you are just like getting information overload. You got to drip feed that stuff, man. And then most of the time what you need as a beginner is not knowledge, it's action. So, I gatekeep the hell out of stuff once you're in my program, which is interesting because I'm not very much of a gatekeeper outside of it. But, you know, I lock all the future months until you've been in the program at least that much time. Meaning, if you want month two access to Maker School, you need like two months in Maker School, basically, or at least, I guess, one month in Maker School. Um, some people don't like this. They message me saying, "Hey, Nick, uh, you know, I don't like this. I want you to unlock all the resources for me and stuff." What I do is I'll say something like, "Hey, um, do you run a business?" And then they're like, "Yeah, you know, I've been running a business for the last three months." I just ask, "Well, how much money you making?" And if they can give me some sort of verifiable proof that they're making more than like, you know, peanuts, then I will give them access to the next month. And then if they don't, you know, if they're at the start line of their business, I say, you know, what you need right now is you don't need knowledge, you need action. Like, you need to do the lead genen in the program. And if you don't like that, I'm happy you to give you a refund. Um, and maybe like 30% of those take me up in it, but the other 70% go, okay, that makes sense. And some of the people that have sent messages asking for unlocked resources have turned around in a couple months and been like, "Dude, I'm really glad that you didn't unlock the resources. what I needed to do was just like continue doing the actions, not consuming knowledge. And some of them now make many thousands of dollars a month. So beneficial for me, beneficial for the people in the program, I think.

Next up is a sidebar. So you know how in school you have like a little sidebar section here. Well, this is mine. Uh, first thing I do is I mention the price. When you mention the price, you just tell everybody that is in the program, hey, look at how much more expensive it is now. So if somebody's considering pausing or leaving or whatever, they're a lot less likely to do that because they're like, well, if I try and come back in, I have to pay full price. That's obviously churn reduction. Um, then I have my main value prop and then in my case I have a guarantee. Then I'm using the links feature in school and the first thing I do is I have a best of maker school. Best of maker school is basically just like a massive list of people that have just made tons of money. So William closed $15K in his first 60 days. Zero tech background. Adrian made $2.6K in his first 10 days. Cooper turned a small Upwork deal into $25K. Eugene closed $1500s in his first 5 days. Trevor did this. Samantha closes. Julian made this. Ike did this. I think got invited to a dinner with Brian Johnson. That was wild. Uh so anyway, the point that I'm making is like this is the easiest, simplest thing that I think any community member, any community owner can do if they really want to like constantly have this culture of winning. When people join, you make them read that thread and then they go, "Holy [ __ ] this is possible." And then you just like sidebar it 24/7 and make it like the most accessible link. Cuz I just want people to break their limiting beliefs in this program. And obviously it helps me because the fewer limiting beliefs people have, the longer they're likely to stay and like trust what I have to say, right?

Next up, I do $21K in discounts. So, there's a link over here that you can join, um, which if you, uh, sign up to with your like Maker School email address, the one that you use to sign up to this, you get $21,000 in discounts to a bunch of different tools. Uh, it's not exactly $21,000. Some people claim way more than this, some people claim way less, but like basically it's like a big tool aggregator, which is like makes the return on investment of joining my community immediate. So, it's like, you know, I could pay $184 and then immediately get $600 in uh, credits to a tool that I'm planning on using. It's like, well, obviously I'm going to join the program, right? And then add everyone on socials is pretty cool. Um, I didn't really think this would be super valuable, but yeah, in hindsight, it's one of the most valuable things I've ever done. Um, I get people coming into the program for all different social media platforms. Okay? Some people come through LinkedIn, some people come through YouTube, some people come through Instagram. So, what add everyone on socials does is it just like gives you a way to add me on all social media platforms. And then I say, I will add and follow you back on any of the following platforms. And so, somebody follows me on Twitter, I follow them back. Somebody follows me on LinkedIn, I follow them back. Same thing with Instagram. And if you think about it, like this is back in September 2024. Like do you know how many people have entered Maker School since then? This is when I started Maker School. September 2024. We're talking like I don't know probably like seven or 8,000. So I get like 7,000 free LinkedIn people, LinkedIn followers basically, which is sweet. Obviously I follow them all back and stuff. My LinkedIn feed is now like a freaking battle zone, but um you know it's not like I spend my day reading my LinkedIn feed, right? So this has been cool. And then it also allows you to like stay in touch even if you leave school later, which is cool because obviously if you're in my nurturing network now and like you start getting hit with LinkedIn posts or whatever, a lot of people just see my post, go, "Damn, that was a good community. I should get back into it." Then they join my community again. So I basically get them like in a nurture list if that makes sense.

And then yeah, um last thing, second last thing is community exclusives. Um where basically one big issue I was finding is, you know, I do give away a lot of stuff, right? and like not gatekeeping is a big part of my YouTube um uh you know like my YouTube brand. I just like give everybody all the knowledge and then I say knowledge should be free. It's 2025. So I think a logical question is like well Nick if knowledge is free then why the hell would I pay money to join your community? Like you were already giving everything away. What else could you possibly give me? So what I've had to do is I've had to like find a way to give people inside of my community some additional value that you wouldn't otherwise get just listening to me yap on on my main YouTube channel. And uh what I've settled on is this idea of community exclusives where you if you join my community then I don't know once a week or so on average I will record some long form video that's just me talking about a particular topic that people really want to hear more about. I'll take uh polls and then I'll see what people really like want to learn more about and then I'll just like do some big you know almost like a whiteboard style presentation where I just chat about it for a certain period of time and I find people really like it because I think about the sort of people that join my community. They're the sort of people that just like listening to me app anyway, so I don't really need crazy production value. It's just mostly me and my thoughts. And yeah, you know, there's some some real nuggets that I draw from time to time. But yeah, on my end, it's not very difficult. It's not very time inefficient. I just get to do it in little periods and openings that I have and I can just, you know, sit down and record a 45minute video on like my thoughts about focus and then release it and then people really like it. So yeah, I'm saying stuff like never to be published on YouTube community exclusive and so on and so forth. And then ever since I did that um I found that this had a very very positive impact on churn. So that was very very beneficial.

And then finally DMs. Um, you know, if you guys go back to school here you'll notice that I have a fair number of DMs right 43 here 99. I never look at the notifications. DMs though I clear them out about once a week. Now obviously because I'm very active and because I like give a lot of value and stuff like that. A lot of people do feel like they could DM me. Particularly people maybe that like um I don't know just lack that internal social compass to be like hm should I ask Nick uh this question that I could realistically find an answer to in 30 seconds if I just use the search bar you know some people just don't understand that and that's okay I'm targeting as I mentioned mostly beginners a lot of the people that join are young a lot of people that join are just not the sort of people that have a lot of business experience they don't understand kind of what I'm doing on a day-to-day basis so I get it um and that's okay I used to respond to them every single day doing that inbox zero stall but I have found this to be pretty ineffective because in reality um if instead of responding every day, I just respond once a week. I find that by the time I circle back, most people have already answered their own questions and they answer them within like an hour of asking me them anyway. So, it's just way more effective for me to do it that way. And then I encourage them all just like, "Hey, create a school post. That way, if you guys make a school post and I answer it, then everybody else will get to see making it leverage consulting, not, you know, just one-on-one time." So, yeah, that's what I do. I batch them. Um, in terms of how they break down, I did a little bit of math the other day cuz I was interested. Uh, about an eighth or so are refund requests. About half of them are people asking questions about the program that could be answered really simply. Uh, about a quarter of them are just thank yous. And then maybe another eighth of them, something like this, are business opportunities where people say, "Hey, you know, got this big client. He's really interested in your stuff. Would you be interested in working with him?" I turn the vast majority of these down, but a couple of these have led to some serendipity, which I'm happy for.

And I guess I lied. There's actually one more. There's um levels. Uh now this idea of levels is a feature that school introduced a while ago. I know some people are using them pretty often. I don't basically at all. So in my case, I think just cuz I'm doing a daily program, it would add a significant amount of like daily complexity for me if I did this. Um I don't really want that complexity. So in my case, I don't I don't do any of that.

Okay, and then yeah, the last big chunk here is just ignoring distractions. So you know, as the number one school earner as of right now, um I get pitched stuff all day. I get pitched in new business models. uh novel ideas, ways to monetize my community, you know, I should make a SAS, you should partner with me to do this, blah blah blah. And I gotten so many of them and I've gone through so many of these rabbit holes that I think I'm confident, I can confidently say that um that's really well-intentioned, but it's all misguided. And the vast majority of it is not at all helpful, not at all as helpful as just continuing to do the main thing that you normally do, which is in my case, community management. So, a lot of people in my space are like, "Nick, dude, I got this great idea for software product. We have $50,000 in funding. we'll do it all for you. All we need is like build a software solution and then um we'll sell to the community. You have 3,000 people. If you build a software product and sold to them as part of your program, you'd massively increase your revenue. You'd also diversify away from school so you wouldn't just have all your eggs in one basket. But like if you just look at it from a face value perspective, like like let's actually do the math. If you sell a $50 a month software product, how many people in your community can you actually upsell that to? How many people? Like actually, if we're just being like realistic here, I'm saying 20%. You probably not even do 10, but let's say 20%. If you sell a $50 a month project product to 28% of the community and let's say I have 2,700 people, at least as of the time of this recording, this is um changing. Um that's $27,000 a month, which is 9% of my gross. Okay, not even 9% of my gross, even less. So, it's like, what else could I do that would deliver me 9% more money? Well, could I just make maker school 9% better? Like, duh. Take way less time. It's something that I'm already good at doing. 9% is nothing, you know? It's like one/10th, 1/11th. Of course, I could make maker school 9% better and make 9% more money. And I'd rather do that because I'm just way better at it. You know what I mean? It's proven. I also have a lot of people pitching business models like lead sharing, marketplace, and all that stuff. But, um, yeah, the way that I see it is like basically right now I have a button. Okay, the button is this beautiful school and I just press it and every time I press it, I make $7,444 an hour. Wouldn't I just rather press it more than try and create some big cool new disruptive thing? Like, I'm going to be real with you guys. I'm not Steve Jobs here, okay? I'm not exactly disrupting any industries. All I'm doing is I'm taking something that works and I'm just making it a little bit better and run well, in my opinion, not a little bit better, like significantly more effectively and efficiently than most other people do. So, yeah, you know, um just in terms of like that last strategic part, um ignoring distractions I think is really important.

And then speaking of which, that takes me to that last part about strategy. I think I've said it's the last part like 40 times now, but uh this is actually the end of the guide. Um, the reality is I'm I have very little to say about this. I'm not a very strategic person. What I am is consistent and the way I see things over enough time, consistency will beat strategy every single time. So, if you're going to focus on developing and harnessing a skill here, don't focus on AI. Don't focus on automation. Don't focus on becoming the cool strategic master. Just focus on being consistent cuz that skill in the long run will win. And as long as you don't quit, you have two choices. You either win or you die because that is basically the only other alternative. I have so many people that always ask me what the strategy behind Maker School is, I'm obviously going to do a conversation at the in LA at the school games headquarters here talking about it and so on and so forth. But the reality is like the only real reason I want if we just boil away all the BS is that I just showed up every day for a very long period of time. So you could delete 90% of this post if you just walked away with that, you would you would probably be able to outshine the rest of my rocks no problem. Feedback beats planning every single time. You can't think your way out of most issues. You can't like whiteboard a big fat sexy strategy and think that that's going to solve everything for you. You actually have to interface with your customers and your target audience. Then you have to use those takeaways to improve the core product. If you just show up, it is the hammer that turns everything else into a nail. So you can launch the crappiest community on day one like I did, believe me. But if you show up every single day and then just make it a little bit better and better and better over enough time, eventually you will succeed. And that's how you should frame it. It's just eventually I will succeed. It's just a matter of time, just a number of reps, and so on and so forth. Okay, I spend a good hour and a half every single day interacting with my core customer and so I understand my core customer extraordinarily well and so I'm able to build better products that serve the needs of those core customers better every single day and that's one of the reasons that's the main reason why Maker School works as well as it does.

Okay, so hopefully all of that makes sense. Uh had a lot of fun putting that together for you guys. Thank you very much for watching and listening to me out. If you guys have school communities and stuff like that and have any questions, you guys can actually ask them down below on this video. Um, these are did funky stuff to my lighting. These are my daily updates. So, um, I just answer all the questions on my daily updates channel um, given a long enough time. Again, just another example of showing up. And, um, yeah, if you guys want to chat strategy, if you guys want to chat um, YouTube growth, if you guys want to chat AI specifically, then then let me know. But, uh, that's been that. And if you guys are going to the school games in about I think four or five days now, let me know. I'd love to connect. maybe grab a coffee or a drink or something like that. Um, chat communities and just like what we're doing to take over the world more generally. Thank you very much and looking forward to chatting with you all soon.