Who
Stephen G. Pope runs AI Architects Skool, a paid Skool community for people building AI automation systems.
Before
A paid community is not a course. Members show up every day with questions, and every one that goes unanswered is a renewal that quietly doesn't happen. The community needed to run well without consuming the person whose name is on it.
What the work actually was
One package, run daily for about two years:
- Technical support inside the community, answering questions about AI, automations, agents and Stephen's own products
- Written answers, tutorial videos and Zoom calls, whichever the question needed
- Onboarding new members
- Moving free members to paid, deliberately by hand, because the automated version was tested and performed worse
- Keeping the classroom content maintained
- Recording tutorial and course videos
- Content research
- General community management and admin
What changed
Over that period the community grew from around 200 members to around 900, and churn came down from 24% to 9%.
Why it matters
Most people who can run community support can't build the automations that fix what they're triaging. Most people who build automations don't do hands-on support. This was both jobs, every day, for two years, which is where the habit of turning a repeated support ticket into a system came from.
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