I spent an hour with the founder of Skool

A few days ago, I spent an hour with Sam Ovens.

If the name doesn't ring a bell, he built Skool: the community platform that has quietly become a billion-dollar company while the giants who were supposed to own that market, the ones with bigger teams and venture money, watch from behind.

I won't tell you what we talked about. Some of it was his to share, not mine. But I haven't stopped thinking about his business since, because the way he built it cuts against most of what the growth playbook preaches. And the longer I look, the more I think he's right and the playbook is wrong.

Three things in particular. Not the reasons people usually credit him for (Hormozi's money, the gamification, “community is the future”). Those are real, but they're downstream. These are the decisions sitting underneath.

1. He keeps the team tiny on purpose. It's his edge, not a stage he hasn't outgrown.

Skool runs on roughly 45 people. Its competitors run on hundreds. Most founders would read that as a company that simply hasn't staffed up yet. Sam reads it as the reason the product is any good. And i couldn’t agree more, 6 years ago my marketing team wes 114 people and today its 17 people doing more revenue.

The logic is worth sitting with, because it's the reverse of how most companies hire. When you add someone who's merely fine, you don't just get fine work from that seat. You get a lower bar for the whole room. Fine starts to look acceptable. Decisions slow down because there are more people to keep aligned. And your strongest people, the ones who showed up because the standard was high, feel it slip. Those are the exact people with somewhere else to go.

A great hire compounds. A mediocre one quietly taxes everyone near them, and you almost never trace the drag back to the source.

The takeaway isn't “hire from SpaceX.” Most of us can't, and that's not the point. It's to stop treating an empty seat like a fire. The wrong person in it will cost you more than the vacancy does. Raise your bar until it stings, then only hire beneath it.

2. Simplicity isn't a design taste. It's something you have to defend.

The first time you use Skool, what hits you is how little there is. No maze of settings. No fourteen ways to do one thing. When someone joins a paid community it's basically two taps: the card is already on file, the price and “cancel anytime” sit together, and the button says JOIN, not “complete your purchase.”

It looks effortless, which is precisely why it's so hard to copy. Nobody ever set out to build a twelve-step checkout. It accreted, one reasonable-sounding addition at a time, until buying turned into a chore. Complexity is the natural resting state of everything you make. Simple is the thing you have to keep choosing, against a hundred small pressures to add one more field, one more step, one more option.

So go be a stranger in your own funnel this week. Open it on your phone and try to buy what you sell. Count the taps between wanting it and having it, and be honest about how many you actually need. Most of the friction, you built yourself. Almost none of it will be missed once it's gone.

3. While everyone else rents attention, he built engines that don't need it.

This is the one I keep circling back to, because it answers a problem every marketer reading this has right now: ads only get more expensive, and most businesses have no response except to pay up.

Skool's response was to almost stop buying ads at all. They have reportedly cut ad spend by around 90%. The growth is built into the product instead.

The obvious piece is the Skool Games, a monthly competition run with Hormozi that ranks communities by the revenue they generate. Look at what that machine actually does. It gets thousands of creators grinding to grow communities that live on Skool. It manufactures a steady supply of winners, proof, and stories. And the best playbooks get handed back to everyone watching. They turned their own customers into the marketing department, and the customers say thank you.

The quieter piece is the one you can copy tomorrow: the free community. The standard Skool move isn't running ads to a sales page. It's opening a free group, being genuinely useful in it until people trust you, and letting the paid offer become the obvious next step. The free room does the selling ads used to do.

So the lesson isn't just “diversify your revenue.” It's sharper than that. When the price of attention keeps climbing, the winners aren't the ones who bid better at the auction. They're the ones who build growth they don't have to rent: a referral loop, a free front end that ascends into a paid one, a reason for one customer to hand you the next. Ask the uncomfortable version of the question. If your ad account went dark tomorrow, what would still bring you buyers? If the honest answer is “not much,” that's the most expensive gap in your business, and it stays invisible right up until the day it isn't.

Pull the three together and it's the same move every time. Sam took the harder, slower, less flattering option: a smaller team, a plainer product, growth he owns instead of rents. It compounded into something the big-budget crowd couldn't buy their way past.

Most of the money you're losing looks just like that. Not a blowup. A slow leak under a business that looks perfectly fine from the outside. That's why I built the free Revenue Leak Calculator: it shows you, in real dollars, where yours is going. Three minutes, and it's here:

— Marisha

P.S. The tell with Sam's whole approach is that none of it looks impressive. A small team. A plain checkout. A free group. The best moves rarely photograph well. They just quietly win.