Should I launch as free or paid?

Paid, almost always — at least $30/month for entry. Free communities require massive top-of-funnel volume to be useful and attract a higher percentage of members who will never engage. A $30 paid filter qualifies members at the door and reduces moderation work dramatically. The exception is if your community is a top-of-funnel for a higher-ticket offer (a $5,000 mastermind or a coaching program), in which case a free Skool community can work as a lead generator.

What's the right price to start at?

Most successful first-time Skool communities launch at $30–$50/month entry. That price is high enough to filter for serious members but low enough that members will swipe a card without a sales call. Once you have 50–100 members and a track record of results, you can layer in a higher-tier ($100–$300) offering. Starting above $200 without prior trust or social proof usually fails — you will burn your network on day one and have nothing to show for it.

Do I need to record courses before launch?

No — and you should not. Build a five-lesson Classroom skeleton (welcome video plus three placeholders) and let the depth come from your weekly live calls being recorded and added to modules over the first 90 days. Pre-launch course building is where most communities die: months of solo recording, no member feedback, and no community heat to launch into. Skeleton first, depth later.

How do I get the first 10 members?

Personal DMs to people who already trust you. Past clients, engaged email subscribers, friends in the right niche. Tell them this is a founding-member invite, free for 30 days, and you specifically thought of them. Ten members soft-launching together creates feed motion that public-announcement traffic converts into. Skipping the soft launch and going straight to a Twitter announcement is the most common reason new communities feel dead in week one.

What automations should I install on day one?

Three: a welcome DM sequence triggered the moment someone joins, a Churn Saver DM that fires within 60 seconds of a cancel click, and a scheduled posts queue so the feed never goes dead. Skool ships none of these natively. Install tools4skool — a Chrome extension that uses your existing skool.com session, no password stored. The free plan handles 1 sequence and 20 DMs/day, which is enough for the first 20–50 members. Building manual habits and trying to scale them later almost always fails.

Setting Up a Skool Community: The Complete 2026 Guide

On this page

TL;DR
Decisions before you click create
The core platform setup
Classroom and content skeleton
Paywall, pricing, Stripe
Soft launch + first 10 members
Automations to install on day one
FAQ

TL;DR

Setting up a Skool community has two distinct phases. Phase 1 — decisions (90% of success): pick a tight niche, lock in your transformation promise ("after 30 days members will have X"), pick the name and URL, decide free vs paid, decide the price ($30–$300/month is the realistic range). Phase 2 — clicks (the easy part): create the community at skool.com/new, upload logo and banner, write the About page, build a 3-module classroom skeleton, connect Stripe, set the price, pin a welcome post, schedule the first live call. Total focused-work time across both phases is about 6 hours over a week. After launch, the part that breaks most communities is the daily operations — welcome DMs, churn signals, scheduled posts, replying to every comment. Skool ships none of that natively. Install tools4skool from day one; the free tier covers the first 20–50 members and you avoid building habits around manual work that will not scale. The whole sequence below is in the order I would run it if I were starting over today.

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Decisions before you click create

Spend two hours here before you ever load skool.com/new. Niche. Generic communities die. Tight communities thrive. "Sales coaching" is too broad; "outbound coaching for B2B SaaS SDRs" is the right resolution. The niche should fit in one sentence with a clear verb (help, teach, build) and a clear who. Transformation promise. What will a member be able to do after 30 days of being inside that they cannot do today? If you cannot answer in one sentence, the community will not retain. Free vs paid. Free communities are easier to grow and harder to monetize. Paid communities ($30–$100 entry) qualify members at the door and reduce moderation work by 80%. Pick paid unless you have a clear funnel that turns free members into a higher-ticket offer. Name and URL. Skool URLs are permanent (skool.com/your-slug). Pick something that is short, memorable, and not a person's name unless your personal brand is the product. Pricing. $30–$50 entry, $100+ premium tier later. Do not start above $200 unless you have prior trust. Three ranges, one decision each.

1
Lock the niche, transformation, and price
Two hours of writing before you click anything. One sentence each: who it is for, what they will be able to do in 30 days, what they pay.
2
Create the community and configure basics
Visit skool.com/new, pick a permanent slug, upload logo and banner, write the About page, set categories.
3
Connect Stripe and set pricing
Settings → Payments → Connect Stripe. Set monthly price, optionally add annual, decide on the 14-day trial.
4
Build the Classroom skeleton (5 lessons)
One Start Here module (3 lessons) and one Playbook module (2 placeholder lessons). Lock the Playbook behind Level 2.
5
Pin a welcome post
Explain rules, where to introduce themselves, how to unlock content, where the live call lives.
6
Soft-launch to 10 founding members
Personal DMs to people who fit. Get the feed warm before any public announcement. Convert to paid by day 30.
7
Install automations from day one
Use tools4skool to set up an Auto DM Sequence, the Churn Saver, and a scheduled posts queue. Free plan covers the first 20–50 members.

The core platform setup

Once decisions are locked, the click path is short. Visit skool.com/new, sign in or create an account, pick your community slug — this is the URL forever, so spell it carefully. Upload a logo (1:1 ratio, 500×500px works), a banner (4:1 horizontal), and write a one-line tagline. Configure the basic privacy settings: public (anyone can see the About page and the feed) or private (only members can see anything beyond the About page). Most paid communities use private. Set the categories in the feed — start with three: Introductions, Wins, Questions. You can add more later. Toggle on post approval if you want to moderate before posts go live; toggle off if you want a low-friction feed and you trust your audience. Configure the Calendar for your time zone. Configure your About page with a clear headline, who it is for, who it is not for, what they get, and one piece of social proof if you have any. The whole core setup takes about 90 minutes.

Classroom and content skeleton

The classic mistake is over-building the Classroom before launch. A polished 12-module course delays your start by months and most of it will be wrong because you have not yet learned what your members actually struggle with. Build a skeleton instead: one module called "Start Here" with three short lessons (welcome video, how this community works, your first action item), and one module called "The [Your Topic] Playbook" with three placeholder lessons that link to the live calls you will record over the first 30 days. That is it. Five lessons total before launch. The depth comes from live calls being recorded and dropped into modules over time, plus member-generated artifacts (best deal-review threads, top wins, FAQs from the feed). Lock the second module behind Level 2 — that is your gamification trigger that gets members posting in the feed to earn points. Total Classroom build time: 90 minutes if you record videos in one sitting.

Paywall, pricing, Stripe

Open Settings → Payments and connect your Stripe account. If you do not have one, the connect flow guides you through Stripe's signup — about 15 minutes. Set your monthly price first ($30, $50, $100 — pick your range), then optionally add an annual price at roughly 10× monthly (gives a 2-month discount). Toggle the 14-day free trial on if you are confident new members will convert; toggle off if you want pure paid filtering. Tax: Skool does not collect or remit sales tax for you. If you are selling into the EU, UK, or California, decide now whether to use Stripe Tax (cleanest), Anrok, or Quaderno. Refund policy: Skool gives the member access until the end of their billing period when they cancel; refunds are a Stripe action you trigger manually. Most healthy communities run a 14-day no-questions refund policy on the first month and no refunds after. Document this on the About page and in the welcome post. Finally, generate the public checkout link and test it with a $1 product before going live.

Soft launch + first 10 members

Do not announce on Twitter on day one. Soft launch first. Identify ten people who would benefit from the community — past clients, engaged email subscribers, friends who fit the niche. DM them personally with a paragraph: what the community is, who it is for, why you thought of them, and a one-line invite to join free for 30 days as founding members. The goal of these ten is not revenue — it is feed activity. A community with ten active posters in week one converts three to five times better when you go public than a community with two posters. Have those ten introduce themselves on day one, post a question on day two, share a small win on day three. Once the feed has motion, post a launch announcement to your wider audience on day seven. Convert the founding members to paid (or grandfather them free) before going public. The soft launch is the entire game — most communities skip it and then publicly launch into a dead room.

Automations to install on day one

Skool ships zero native automations. No triggered welcome DMs, no churn-recovery flows, no scheduled posts beyond manual queues, no API. If you build manual habits in the first 30 days, those habits will not survive 100 members. Install tools4skool before you launch — it is a Chrome extension that runs against your existing skool.com session, no password handed over. Day-one setup is three things. One Auto DM Sequence: triggered the moment a member joins, with three messages spaced over the first week — welcome, classroom pointer, first-call invitation. Churn Saver: a single message that fires within 60 seconds of a member clicking cancel; this alone recovers 10–25% of cancellers when written well. Scheduled posts: queue three posts for the week ahead so the feed never goes dead during your weekend. The free plan handles 1 sequence and 20 DMs/day, which covers the first 20–50 members. Scale to Starter ($29) or Pro ($59) as you grow. Kate Capelli ran $59/month → $4,000/month more in 2 weeks doing exactly this; not unusual for active operators.

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Frequently asked

About six hours of focused work spread across a week. The actual platform clicks take 90 minutes; the rest is decisions (niche, transformation, pricing) and content (one welcome video, three short lessons, the About page). Most creators stretch this to a month because they over-build the Classroom before launch. Resist that. Build a skeleton, soft-launch to ten people, and let the live calls become your real content over time.