How to Create a Skool Community: The Complete Step-by-Step Guide (2026)
We have zero organic audience. No built-up following, no past content, nothing here yet. This is the first thing we've published on this channel. And we built the community anyway, live, starting from nothing.
We've done this before, just never in public. Legal English, a Skool community Ted and I built a while back, now makes more than $5,000 a month. This time, instead of building quietly and showing up once it works, we're documenting it from the very first click.
Step 1: Choosing a Plan
Skool gives you two options when you start a community.
Hobby, $9/month
Unlimited members, courses, video, and livestreams. The catch: a 10% transaction fee on anything you sell through the platform, no custom URL, no affiliate program.
Pro, $99/month
Same unlimited core features, but the transaction fee drops to 2.9%. Pro also adds:
A custom link for your community, instead of Skool's default URL structure
An affiliate program, so members can earn commission for referrals
Unlimited admins
Plugins like Zapier integration and Meta Pixel tracking
The option to hide suggested communities on your page
Webinars
Advanced analytics
We don't have anything to sell yet, so we started on Hobby. Skool lets you upgrade at any point. No reason to pay for Pro-only features before you actually need them.
Step 2: Naming Your Community
The name field allows up to 30 characters, and you can change it later. It's not a permanent decision. We went with Morphios Lab.
Step 3: The Audience-Size Question
Right after signup, Skool asks how big your existing audience is: under 10k, 10k to 100k, 100k to 1M, or over 1M. It's onboarding data for Skool, not a requirement. If you're starting with zero, that's a normal answer to give. It's the one we gave.
Step 4: Branding, Logo & Banner
Before touching any of the community settings, it's worth making the page look like something real instead of a placeholder. We built our logo and banner in Figma, no advanced plugins or techniques, just the basic tools.
Skool asks for two image uploads under General settings:
Icon: 128×128px
Cover: 1084×576px
There's also a Group Description field, capped at 150 characters. It's the one-line pitch for your community, worth writing on purpose instead of filling in as an afterthought.
(Want the actual Figma process for the logo and banner? Tell us in the comments and we'll cover it in a future piece.)
Step 5: Getting Found, Discovery Settings
By default, every new Skool community is unlisted, invisible in Skool's internal search. To get listed, Skool requires five things:
A cover image set
A group description added
A completed About page
Your first post published
Three friends who join
Keywords
You can add up to 11 keyword tags to help your community surface in relevant searches. We used community building, course creation, online business, solopreneur, creator economy, memberships, AI for business, personal brand, digital products, and digital services: 10 of the 11 slots.
How Skool's ranking actually works
Skool publishes the exact factors, which is unusually direct for a platform like this.
What boosts your ranking: traffic you bring to your page yourself, real member engagement, payments processed through the platform instead of routed around it, and you being an active owner.
What hurts it: taking payments outside the platform, bots or fake accounts, spam, low-quality engagement, and poor customer support.
Step 6: Choosing How to Charge, The Full Pricing Breakdown
This is the part that got cut from the video for pace, because it's where we went back and forth the most ourselves. Skool gives you five monetization models.
Free
No charge to join. Makes sense if the community itself isn't the product yet, or you're monetizing some other way.
Subscription
A flat recurring fee: monthly, yearly, or both. We tried this first, testing $99/month or $999/year. When we set the annual price, Skool flagged that a 16% discount sits on the low end of what members typically expect. 20% is closer to standard if you want the annual option to actually convert.
Freemium
A free entry tier (Skool calls it "Standard") plus one or two paid tiers on top ("Premium" and "VIP"). People join free and upgrade once they see value.
Tiers
Two to three paid tiers, no free option. Useful if free members tend to lurk without engaging, and you'd rather every member have some financial buy-in from day one.
One-time payment
A single charge for lifetime access, no recurring billing.
We ended up not locking in a model yet, because we don't have a course built inside the community and don't fully know what the offer looks like. If you're in the same spot: don't force a pricing decision before you know what you're actually charging for. Start free or keep it flexible, and set real pricing once there's real content and real demand behind it.
Step 7: Plugins, What Each One Actually Does
Skool's Plugins tab has extra tools. Some are free on every plan, some are Pro-only.
Membership questions (free) let you ask people something before they're allowed to join, like their email or what they're hoping to get out of the group. We added two: what people want to build or grow with Morphios Lab, and their email.
Unlock chat at a level (free) requires members to reach a certain activity level before they can send direct messages, which cuts down on DM spam from brand-new accounts.
Unlock posting at Level 2 or 3 (free) applies the same idea to posting: fewer low-effort or spammy first posts, because members need some history first.
Auto DM new members (Pro) sends an automatic welcome message the moment someone joins.
Onboarding video (Pro) shows new members a short video as part of their first experience in the group.
Zapier integration (Pro) connects Skool to other tools: automatically invite members, unlock courses, or send membership-question answers straight to your CRM.
Meta Pixel tracking (Pro) lets you run Facebook and Instagram ads to your About page, retarget visitors, and track signups.
Step 8: Setting the Culture, Categories & Rules
Under the Community tab, three things are worth configuring early.
Tabs: turn Classroom, Calendar, and Map on or off depending on what you'll actually use. We kept all three on.
Categories: organize posts so the feed isn't one undifferentiated wall of text. Skool starts you with a default "General discussion" category; we added "Announcements" as a second.
Rules: a short list members see when they join. Ours are simple: be positive, no self-promotion, make an effort, and the fourth one is just "make money," because that's genuinely why most people will be here.
Step 9: Creating Your First Event
An empty calendar makes a community feel dead before it's started. Skool gives you templates: Coffee Hour, Q&A, Co-working Session, Happy Hour, or a fully custom option.
We created a simple "Hang Out" call, set for the same day, to give people a reason to show up and talk about making money online.
The Result
At the end of this process: the community is public, not unlisted anymore. It has its first members. The About page reflects everything above: logo, banner, description, an active calendar. There's no course inside yet, and we're not pretending otherwise. It's real, it's live, and it's growing in public from here.
Join Us
We're building Morphios Lab completely in the open, starting from zero. If you want to be one of the first people inside, no polished course yet, just an honest start, the link is below.
Want to build something like this yourself? You don't need to wait for the perfect idea, any skill or hobby works as a starting point. Sign up here and you'll get the exact same walkthrough we just gave you.
Next up: we're pulling back the curtain on Legal English, a Skool community Ted and I actually built together, and sharing the real numbers: what it earns, how it grew, what worked and what didn't.
