How to create a Skool community: a step-by-step guide

How to create a Skool community, in one paragraph: you sign up, pick a plan (both come with a 14-day free trial), add a logo, a cover image, and a solid About page, write your rules, decide who can get in, set up a first course and a first live call, and open the doors with a welcome post. If you know what you want to build, it takes an afternoon. That's everything you need to get off to a good start.

Whether a community works or not almost never comes down to the technical side, which Skool makes easy. It comes down to what you decide at each step: what you say on your About page, what you ask people before they join, what someone sees first when they arrive. That's why this guide doesn't stop at “click here.” At each step, we walk you through the options and the one that tends to work best.

Everything we say about Skool (tabs, settings, what comes with each plan) was checked on Skool's website and help center on October 22, 2026. Skool changes things often. If something doesn't match what you see, it may have moved.

Before you open: what to decide first

You can start a Skool community today and figure everything out as you go, but four decisions will save you work if you make them before your 14-day trial begins.

The first is your topic and who it's for. Not “marketing,” but “marketing for dentists who want more patients.” The more specific you get, the easier it is to write your About page, choose your membership questions, and know which course to build first. If you're stuck, write one sentence in this shape: “For [who] who wants [result] without [what's holding them back].”

The second is whether it'll be free or paid. Skool lets you run a free community, a subscription, a free plan alongside a paid one, several price tiers, or a one-time payment. You don't need an exact price yet, but you do need the model, because it changes how you approach everything else.

The third is which Skool plan you need. Hobby costs $9/month, and Skool keeps 10% plus 30¢ of every payment. Pro costs $99/month, Skool keeps 2.9% plus 30¢, and it comes with features Hobby doesn't have (you'll see them in step 9). If you want to run the numbers properly, they're all in our breakdown of Skool pricing.

The fourth is the name. Short, easy to say out loud, and clear about what the community is. If people know you by your personal brand, putting it in the name helps.

Step 1: create your account and your community

To create a community, you need a Skool account. If you're already a member of a community, you can use that same account. From there, you choose to create a community, give it a name, and start the 14-day free trial on one of the two plans.

During the trial, you get the full community so you can set it up without rushing. When the trial ends, your subscription renews automatically every month or every year, depending on what you picked, until you cancel. If you decide Skool isn't for you, cancel from your community settings, in the Billing tab, and you won't pay anything else.

Almost everything you'll set up lives in the same place: your community's Settings button. Use this table as a map for the rest of the guide:

Step 2: logo, cover image, and URL

You change your logo and cover in the General tab of your settings, using the change button next to each one. They're not a minor detail. The cover is the first thing people see in Discovery and on your About page, and Skool also uses it to build ads for your community if you turn on Growth Boost. On top of that, having a cover image is one of the requirements for showing up in Discovery, and Skool takes its quality into account when it ranks communities.

A logo that's still readable when it's tiny and a cover that says what the community is about (a photo of you, an image of what people learn inside, the name in large, legible type) work better than an image that's pretty but generic.

The URL is the other decision on this tab. Every community starts with a temporary URL. On the Pro plan, you can swap it for a custom one from the same General tab: type the one you want, check that it's available, and claim it. Your first change is included in the plan. Every change after that costs $100, so choose carefully the first time.

Step 3: your description and About page

This is half of your community's success. Skool says in its help center that the About page is, in practice, your community's landing page and checkout page. It's what everyone sees when they arrive, and it's where they decide whether to join.

You have two pieces of text to write. One is the short community description, which is what shows up in Discovery and in search results. The other is the About page description, the long one. Both are required to appear in Discovery, and so is a complete About page.

You can upload images and videos to your About page. Skool recommends showing what's offered inside, adding a video that explains the community, and including what members say. In practice, that means:

• a short video, one or two minutes long, where you explain who it's for, what people get out of it, and what happens inside;
• screenshots of what's actually there: a course outline, the calendar of calls, a post with replies;
• testimonials as soon as you have them.

The long description should lead with the result and answer the questions of someone who doesn't know you yet. How much time does it take each week? Are there live sessions? Does it work for beginners? What does the price include?

A structure that works for your description

If you don't know where to start, follow this order:

1. One sentence with the result and who it's for.
2. What's inside: courses, calls, challenges, the community.
3. What a normal week inside the community looks like.
4. Who it's not for (yes, saying so filters people out and builds trust).
5. The price, if there is one, and what happens if it's not a fit.

Here's how that could look for a made-up cooking community:

Cook for the whole week in two hours on Sunday, without eating the same thing five days in a row. Inside, you'll find a course to plan your first week, a new menu every Friday with its grocery list, and a live call every Sunday at 11 a.m. to answer questions while you cook. Every week, members share their meal prep containers and their best shortcuts. This isn't for you if you're after restaurant-style recipes: everything here gets made in a regular kitchen with ingredients from the grocery store.

It doesn't need to be long. It needs someone who doesn't know you to understand, in under a minute, what they get by joining.

If you want to dig deeper into what a convincing promise looks like, we cover it with real examples in how to grow your Skool community.

Step 4: your rules

You write your rules in the Rules tab of your settings, adding one rule at a time. Skool includes a few defaults that you can edit or delete.

Skool recommends keeping them simple and direct, and it's right. People read five clear rules. They don't read twenty. Think about what actually worries you: that nobody uses the community to pitch themselves to everyone else, that everyone gets treated with respect, that questions go in the right place, and what's OK in private messages.

Once they're written, you can share the link to your rules in your pinned post or in the first lesson of your course, so new members see them from the start.

Step 5: who gets in

Before you open, decide how people get in: anyone at all, by answering a few questions, or with your approval. You set this up in the Plugins tab of your settings.

Membership questions

You can ask up to three questions to anyone who requests to join, on both plans. Skool suggests an order that works well:

1. A question to see whether they're a fit, like “Why do you want to join?” or “What do you want to achieve with [your topic]?” If you sell something, this answer also helps you offer them the right thing.
2. Their email or their handle on a social network, so you can reach them if they stop logging in to Skool.
3. Where they found you, so you know which channel brings you members.

Skool sums it up like this: harder questions lower sign-ups, but they raise the quality of the people who join. In a paid community, you can afford to ask more. In a free one that wants to grow, keep the questions short.

If you ask for an email address, say what you'll use it for, and use it only for that.

Keeping spam down in large communities

Two plugins, available on both plans, are built for when your community gets bigger: opening chat only to members who've reached a certain level, and letting people post only from level 2 or 3. Skool recommends the first one once you pass about a thousand members, because it stops people who join just to sell by private message. The second has a nice side effect: it nudges people to introduce themselves first, by commenting on the pinned post, before they're able to post.

In a small community, you don't need either one. Early on, you want everyone joining in with nothing in their way.

Auto-approval

On the Pro plan, you can automatically approve anyone who requests to join. Skool recommends it if you're promoting a freebie or running ads to your free community: people get in right away and see what you promised them, without waiting for you to accept them.

Step 6: your first course in the Classroom

The Classroom is the part of your community where content lives: courses, guides, templates, resources, training plans, recipes, whatever fits your topic.

When you create a course, a page appears, ready to fill in. You edit it with the pencil icon, type as you would in any text editor, switch the published toggle on, and save. To organize your content, you can create folders and drag pages into them. You can add resources to each page: a link, a file (a PDF, a spreadsheet), or the transcript of its video, among others.

Don't try to upload everything before you open. A short first course that gets new members to a small win in their first week is worth more than twenty modules nobody finishes. Call it something like “Start Here” and put it first.

Videos

You can upload videos straight to Skool by dragging them onto the page: hosting is included in your plan. As soon as they're processed, they're ready to watch. If you write timestamps in the text underneath, they turn into chapters. Skool generates automatic English captions for videos with sound, and viewers can change the playback speed and quality.

If your videos already live on YouTube, Vimeo, Loom, or Wistia, you can embed them too. If they're unlisted YouTube videos, remember to allow embedding in their YouTube settings.

Who can see each course

Each course has its own access setting, and this is one of the most useful tools Skool gives you:

If you have several price tiers, private courses are what let you give access based on each member's tier. And you can combine settings: for example, a course that opens when someone reaches a level or when they're on a specific plan.

Time unlock is great for not overwhelming new members: the second course shows up after seven days, the third after fourteen. Level unlock turns participation into the key to new content.

Step 7: the calendar and live calls

Live calls are what sets a community apart from a recorded course more than anything else. In the Calendar tab, you create an event with the add button: title, date, time, length (from 30 minutes to 24 hours), time zone, and a description.

If you make it recurring, you choose whether it repeats daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly, on which day of the week, and whether it ends on a date, after a number of sessions, or never. You can add an image so it stands out on the events page.

For the location, Skool defaults to its own video calls, Skool Call, included on both plans. You can also use Zoom or Google Meet, or enter a physical address for an in-person meetup.

Create your first call before you open and give it a fixed slot, like every Tuesday at the same time. Someone who joins and sees there's something happening on Tuesday has a reason to come back on Tuesday.

Step 8: pricing and getting paid

If your community is free, you can skip this step. If it's paid, you need to choose a model and connect your bank.

These are the models Skool supports:

• Free.
• Monthly or annual subscription, with the option to offer a seven-day free trial.
• Freemium: a free plan and a paid plan in the same community.
• Tiers: several paid plans, each with its own perks.
• One-time payment, for lifetime-access courses, cohorts, or seminars.

Prices on Skool are always in US dollars. To get paid, you connect your bank account from the Payouts tab in your settings. Behind the scenes, Skool sets up a Stripe Express account to send you the money; you can't use a Stripe account you already have. Skool pays you every Wednesday, in your local currency. Your first payout takes 8 to 14 days to become available and goes through an extra verification step.

All the numbers (the fee on each payment, when Pro pays for itself, VAT, what isn't refunded) are in our guide to Skool pricing.

Step 9: plugins

The Plugins tab is where Skool's plugins live. Some come with both plans and others only with Pro, so it helps to know which before you choose a plan:

The automatic welcome message deserves a closer look. It reaches every new person one to five minutes after they join, with their name and your community's name in it (you write them with the tags #NAME# and #GROUPNAME#). It isn't sent if the two of you have already talked. Skool suggests ending with one open question and one closed question, for example: “Hey #NAME#, welcome to #GROUPNAME#! Is this your first time on Skool? And what made you want to join?” With two questions that easy to answer, they're more likely to reply and get a conversation going.

The cancellation video is also handy in communities with monthly billing. A short, low-drama video that reminds people what they'd be giving up can keep some of the members who were on the fence.

Step 10: levels and gamification

Skool has a points and levels system that's on by default: every like a post or comment gets is one point for whoever wrote it, and points move people up levels. Before you open, spend five minutes on two things.

The first is your level names. You can set your own, and names tied to your topic make leveling up mean something. In a cooking community, “Prep Cook” and “Line Cook” say more than “Level 2” and “Level 3.”

The second is what each level opens up. You've already seen that a course can open when someone reaches a level. Putting something appealing behind a low level (level 2 takes 5 points, and level 3 takes 20) gets people participating from their first week. The essentials, on the other hand, should be open to everyone.

We go into more detail on how to use levels so people participate and don't leave in how to grow your Skool community.

Step 11: the welcome post and your launch

Before you invite anyone, write your welcome post and pin it to the top of the community. In a few lines, it should explain where everything is and what the first step is (the “Start Here” course, the next call), and it should ask every new person to introduce themselves by answering two specific questions. “Where are you from, and what do you want to achieve?” is much easier to answer than a bare “introduce yourself.”

Here's a template you can adapt:

Welcome! Here's the first thing you need to know. Start with the “Start Here” course in the Classroom: it's three short lessons, and by the end you'll have your first weekly menu. There's a live call every Sunday at 11 a.m., and you'll find it on the calendar. Now introduce yourself in the comments: where are you from, and what would you like to achieve over the next month? We reply to everyone.

Reply to every introduction yourself, even if it's just one line. It's the fastest way to make someone feel they've walked into a place that's alive.

Also post a couple of useful things before you open. An empty community feels cold. One with some content and a few conversations invites people to join in.

To show up in Skool Discovery, your community has to meet a few minimum requirements: a cover image, a description, a complete About page, having posted something, and having invited people, plus a minimum number of members and amount of activity that Skool doesn't spell out. Once you meet them, Skool reviews the community, and it usually shows up within an hour or two. Until then, your first members will come from you: your audience, one-to-one invites, and partnerships.

And one more place to be seen: add your community to SkoolRank. It's free and takes a minute. Your members can vote for it once a day, and the more votes it gets during the month, the higher it ranks in its category and its language, where people looking for communities on that topic will see it.

Checklist before you open

Mistakes to avoid when you create a Skool community

Opening with all the content in the world and zero conversation. A huge Classroom doesn't make a community. Questions, answers, and calls do.

Writing your About page about yourself instead of the person arriving. What you've done or what you know matters less than what someone gets by joining.

Leaving the cover and logo for later. They're the first thing people see, and Skool takes them into account in Discovery.

Asking too much to get into a free community that wants to grow. Every extra question means more people who give up halfway through.

Turning on chat and posting limits while the community is still small. Early on, you want everyone talking.

Changing your URL over and over. On Pro, the first change is included, but every one after that costs $100.

Taking payments outside of Skool to save on the fee. It costs you visibility in Discovery and the convenience of automatic payouts and VAT handling.

Opening without a first call on the calendar. With nothing scheduled, new members have no reason to come back.

Frequently asked questions

Can you create a community on Skool for free?

Not entirely. You can try Skool free for 14 days on either plan, but after that you have to pay: $9/month for Hobby or $99/month for Pro ($7.50/month and $82/month if you pay for the full year). The community you create, though, can be free for your members.

How long does it take to set up a Skool community?

Setting it up takes an afternoon: logo, cover, About page, rules, membership questions, and a short first course. What takes longer is preparing good material for your About page and your first course, so it's a good idea to have that thought through before you start your trial.

Can I change my community's URL?

Yes, on the Pro plan. Every community starts with a temporary URL, and you can claim a custom one from the General tab in your settings. Your first change is included. Every change after that costs $100.

Do I need the Pro plan?

Not to get started. Hobby comes with unlimited members, courses, videos, and calls. You need Pro if you want a custom URL, affiliates, the automatic welcome message, Zapier, auto-approval, or the other plugins in the table in step 9, or once your revenue is high enough that its lower fee pays off.

Can I upload my own videos to Skool?

Yes. Video hosting is included on both plans: drag the video onto a Classroom page or into a post, and once it's processed, it's ready to watch. Skool adds automatic English captions to videos with sound. You can also embed videos from YouTube, Vimeo, Loom, or Wistia.

How many membership questions can I ask?

Up to three, on both plans. Skool suggests using the first to find out whether the person is a fit, the second to ask for an email address or a social handle, and the third to learn where they found you.

Can I run live calls without Zoom?

Yes. Skool has its own video calls, Skool Call, included on both plans and selected by default when you create an event. If you'd rather, you can use Zoom or Google Meet.

How do I get my community into Skool Discovery?

You need a cover image, a community description, and a complete About page, and you need to have posted something and invited people, plus a minimum number of members and amount of activity that Skool doesn't publish. Once you meet those, Skool reviews the community, and it usually shows up within an hour or two. After that, it moves up with growth, activity, and above all, how well you keep your members.