Why FluentCommunity Will Never Dethrone Skool (Unless we change the game)
FluentCommunity could easily replace BuddyBoss, Circle, and Patreon. But dethrone Skool? Not yet. What's your take on this?
Here is the hard truth I’ve learned from talking to hundreds of creators and business owners: Creators don't want to be IT admins. They want to build communities and make money.
Let's look at the reality of the market right now:
FluentCommunity is an absolute masterpiece of engineering. Giving creators 100% data ownership and no transaction fees is a noble mission. But when a creator looks at Skool, they see a "Zero-Friction Experience". They sign up, name their group, and 5 minutes later, they are selling a course. They get instant dopamine.
When they look at self-hosted WordPress communities (even with FC), they see pain: Setting up hosting, configuring SMTP, fixing plugin conflicts, and dealing with the ugly, confusing wp-admin dashboard.
Most non-tech creators will always pay a premium ($99/mo) for convenience over control.
So, how does FluentCommunity actually win? What's your take on this?
That's where the middlemen (i.e. me) come in. We offer FluentCommunity as part of a platform to our clients.
We do all the IT admin stuff, so they get the Skool-like experience (one better, because it's tailored) with the knowledge that it's on a platform they own.
Jonathan Gwyer Yes, IT administrators can handle things like buying hosting, debugging plugin conflicts, and configuring SMTP servers. But there are many features that FluentCommunity code can't do, such as:
- Gamification: Automatically unlocking courses when a level is reached, but the leaderboard doesn't display them or link to the Gift Course so users can see them. There's no "Unlock Post to Feed" feature (currently only "Unlock Chat with members"). I know Shahjahan Jewel and the team could easily do this by modifying the HTML format in "Level Tagline" or writing a separate feature for course selection in the Leaderboard/Gamification Settings.
- Automated messages: An automated messaging process for members.
Hoang Hxn I think that's a different conversation.
The advantage FC on WP has over Skool is how much can be customised. You could do some of this with Flowmattic, and people are developing plugins to add this kind of functionality in other ways.
Unless Skool add an app marketplace like Shopify, it will never be able to match that "I wish I could do this particular thing" that can be done with FC & WP.
To me this isn´t a comparison at all. 2 different Apps, 2 different games, 2 different audiences.
Christian Anderl Yes, absolutely. This post aims to help FluentCommunity find ideas to replace Skool on WordPress.
Hoang Hxn just curious…why do you want FC to replace skool vs coexist?
The goal is not to replace Skool, the goal is to replace Circle.so
Fluent community is far better than Skool in my observation
Data ownership is an important topic, once people realise (and/or for example in Europe more and more people want to avoid giving their data to US companies...), they then look for self-hosted solutions and potentially pay someone to handle the tech part
Patricia BT That's a very helpful perspective, thank you 🙏
Everything has its price... the price for easy and someone else to own your data and fit you into their box and way of doing things OR the price for you to put in some extra effort and be able to customize and do it oyur way and own your data
Morgan McArthur Control is the game at the end of the day. Wordpress gives control, period...
Bryan William Absolutely... hence why a Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos etc don't sign up for a Skool account, they keep the control.
The only place success comes before work... is in the dictionary! put in the extra effort to control your future!
Agreed ... plus, don't forget Skool's Discovery tab! With WP&FC you're building an isolated island, but on Skool, you're opening a shop in a busy mall with built-in organic foot traffic, so to say ...
I remember that I've seen something like a platform-discovery-alike service on https://fchub.co/ but I think they abandoned this idea already ...