Why I Use Both Substack and Skool

(And Why You Might Want To As Well)

Here’s a confession: I’m platform-promiscuous.

Not in the chaotic, scattergun way where you’re posting random thoughts to seventeen different social media accounts and wondering why nothing’s working. No, I mean I’m deliberately running communities and newsletters across multiple platforms, specifically Substack and Skool, and I’m doing it on purpose.

Most people in the creator economy will tell you to “pick your lane” or “focus on one platform.” They’ll say you’re spreading yourself too thin, that you can’t serve two masters, that you’ll burn out trying to maintain both.

They’re not entirely wrong. But they’re not entirely right either.

Because here’s the thing: Substack and Skool aren’t competitors in my world. They’re complementary. They do different things brilliantly, and when you understand what each platform is actually for, you stop seeing them as an either-or choice and start seeing them as a rather elegant one-two punch.

Let me explain.

What Substack Does Brilliantly

Substack is, at its core, a writing platform. Yes, it’s got community features now. Yes, you can do threads and notes and all sorts of social-media-adjacent things. But fundamentally, Substack is where words live.

And it’s bloody good at it.

The Writing Experience

The editor is clean. The formatting is elegant. When someone opens your newsletter in their inbox, it looks good, not like a desperate marketing email that’s been through seven rounds of A/B testing and has more tracking pixels than actual content.

Substack emails feel like letters. They feel personal. They feel like someone actually sat down and wrote something for you, not at you.

This matters more than you might think. In a world where everyone’s inbox is a battlefield and attention is the prize, showing up like a human being rather than a corporation is a genuine competitive advantage.

The Discovery Engine

Substack has spent years building out recommendations, the network effect, and cross-promotion between writers. When someone subscribes to one newsletter, Substack will gently suggest others they might like. When you write a banger of an article, there’s a chance it gets picked up and recommended to thousands of people you’ve never met.

This isn’t guaranteed, of course. But it’s possible in a way that simply doesn’t exist on closed platforms. Substack wants you to grow. Their business model depends on it. They take a percentage of your paid subscriptions, so when you win, they win.

That alignment of incentives is refreshing.

The Simplicity

You write. You publish. People read. Some pay.

That’s it. That’s the whole business model.

There’s no complicated funnel to build. No membership tiers to agonise over. No course platform to integrate. No community forum to moderate. Substack stays in its lane, and that lane is writing, which means you can focus on the thing that actually matters: creating good work.

The Reader Relationship

When someone subscribes to your Substack, you get their email address. Not a platform-mediated relationship where the company sits between you and your audience. Not an algorithm deciding who sees your work. An actual, honest-to-god email list.

This is power. This is portability. This is the difference between building your house on rented land and owning the bloody deed.

If Substack disappeared tomorrow (unlikely, but humour me), you could export your list and move elsewhere. Try doing that with your Instagram following or your YouTube subscribers.

What Substack Doesn’t Do (And Why That Matters)

But here’s where it gets interesting.

Substack is not a community platform. Not really.

Yes, they’ve added chat features. Yes, you can have discussions in the comments. Yes, there’s the whole Notes thing that’s basically Twitter but orange.

But at its core, Substack is a broadcast medium. You write, they read. The interaction is mostly one-directional, with occasional comments that you may or may not have time to reply to thoughtfully.

And that’s fine. That’s actually Substack’s strength. It doesn’t try to be everything.

But if what you’re building requires real community, the kind where members talk to each other, not just to you, then Substack starts to feel a bit limited.

Which brings us to Skool.

What Skool Does Brilliantly

Skool is the opposite of Substack in almost every meaningful way.

Where Substack is about broadcasting, Skool is about conversation. Where Substack is about the writer-reader relationship, Skool is about the member-to-member relationship. Where Substack is elegant simplicity, Skool is organised chaos (the good kind).

The Community Architecture

Skool is built like a modern forum, but without the clunky, early-2000s vibe that phrase probably conjures. It’s clean, gamified, and surprisingly intuitive.

Members can post. They can comment. They can react. They can earn points and level up. They can see what’s trending. They can search through everything that’s ever been posted.

Most importantly, they can talk to each other without you being the bottleneck.

This is huge. Because if you’re building something that requires peer support, accountability, or collaborative learning, you physically cannot be the one responding to every single question or comment. You’ll burn out in a fortnight.

With Skool, you don’t have to be. The community sustains itself. Members help each other. Conversations happen in threads you never even see. The whole thing has a life of its own.

The Gamification

I was sceptical about the gamification at first. It felt a bit… gimmicky.

But it works.

People like earning points. They like levelling up. They like seeing their name on a leaderboard (even if they pretend they don’t care). It creates engagement without you having to constantly poke people to participate.

And unlike some platforms where gamification feels tacked on, Skool baked it into the core experience from day one. It’s not jarring. It’s just… part of how the platform works.

The Course Integration

Skool isn’t just a forum. It’s also a course platform.

You can create structured learning experiences, modules, lessons, videos, and resources, all within the same space where your community lives. This means people don’t have to log into one platform for the course content and another for the community discussion.

Everything lives in one place. This matters more than you’d think. Every additional login, every extra tab, every separate platform is friction. And friction kills momentum.

The Paid Community Model

Skool is designed from the ground up for paid communities. You set your price, people join, Skool handles the payments, and you get your money.

No payment processor to integrate. No membership plugin to wrangle. No Zapier workflows to debug at 2 am when something breaks.

It just works.

And because everyone in your Skool community is paying (or at least opted in via a free community), you don’t get the drive-by commenters or the low-engagement lurkers you might get elsewhere. The barrier to entry, even if it’s just filling out a form, filters for people who actually care.

What Skool Doesn’t Do (And Why You Need Substack)

Now here’s the bit that took me a while to figure out.

Skool is brilliant at community. It’s excellent for courses. It’s fantastic at creating a space where your people can gather, learn, and support each other.

But Skool is terrible at top-of-funnel.

Nobody wakes up and thinks, “I wonder what Skool communities I should join today.” There’s no discovery engine. There’s no built-in audience. There’s no network effect beyond word-of-mouth.

Skool is a walled garden, which is good for the people inside, but makes it bloody hard to get people inside in the first place.

You need something else to drive awareness, build trust, and demonstrate value before someone’s ready to pay for community access.

You need a way to reach people where they already are. A way to show up consistently, share valuable insights, and build a relationship over time.

You need Substack.

How They Work Together

This is where it gets interesting.

I use Substack to build awareness and trust. I write about the topics my niches care about. I share stories, insights, frameworks, and ideas. I show up in their inbox every week (or however often I publish) and slowly, over time, I become someone they trust.

Some people will stay on Substack forever, and that’s fine. They’ll read the free stuff, maybe eventually convert to a paid subscription, and that’s a perfectly good outcome.

But others, the ones who want more than just content, who want community, who want accountability, who want structured learning, those people are primed for Skool.

My Substack becomes the top of the funnel. My Skool communities are the middle and bottom.

I’ll mention my communities occasionally in my newsletter. Not in a pushy, “buy my thing” way, but in a “by the way, if you want to go deeper on this topic, here’s where the real magic happens” way.

And because I’ve spent weeks or months building trust through valuable free content, when I make that invitation, people actually take it.

The Multi-Niche Advantage

Here’s where running multiple communities and newsletters gets particularly interesting.

I have several niches I’m passionate about. I serve several audiences. I’ve built.

If I tried to do all of that on a single platform, it would be chaos. My fitness people don’t care about my writing tips. My entrepreneurship folks don’t want my meditation content. Trying to serve everyone in one space means you end up serving no one particularly well.

But with Substack and Skool working together, I can segment beautifully.

Each niche gets its own Substack newsletter. Clear focus. Clear value proposition. Clear audience.

Each niche gets its own Skool community. Dedicated space. Relevant conversations. Specific courses and resources.

The platforms stay separate, but the strategy stays consistent. And I’m not managing seventeen different tools or cobbling together a Frankenstein tech stack that breaks every other week.

Just two platforms. Both are doing what they do best.

The Practical Reality

Let me be honest about the work involved.

Yes, running multiple newsletters and communities is more work than running one. Obviously.

But it’s not that much more work, because both platforms are designed to be relatively low-maintenance once you’ve set them up properly.

Substack newsletters can be as frequent or infrequent as you want. I’m not churning out daily content. I’m writing when I have something worth saying, and the beauty of email is that it doesn’t demand the constant feeding that social media does.

Skool communities largely run themselves once you’ve seeded the right conversations and established the culture. I pop in daily, answer questions, share insights, and facilitate discussions. But I’m not the only one creating value. The members do that for each other.

The key is systems. Templates for recurring newsletter sections. Content calendars so you’re not scrambling for ideas. Onboarding sequences for new community members. Regular rhythms for community events or challenges.

Without systems, you’ll drown. With them, it’s entirely manageable.

Who This Works For

This dual-platform approach isn’t for everyone.

If you’re just starting out, focus on Substack first. Build your writing practice. Find your voice. Grow your list. Don’t overcomplicate things by trying to run a community before you have an audience to invite.

But if you’ve got:

An existing audience (even a small one)
Something to teach or facilitate beyond just content
A desire to build real community, not just a following
Multiple niches or topics you want to serve

…then the Substack-Skool combination is worth considering.

It’s worked for me across several niches. The newsletters build trust and awareness. The communities deepen relationships and generate revenue. The two platforms play different roles in the same overall strategy.

The Questions You’re Probably Asking

“Isn’t this too complicated?”

Only if you make it complicated. The beauty of using just two platforms, rather than a sprawling tech stack, is that it stays relatively simple. Write newsletters. Facilitate communities. That’s it.

“Won’t I burn out managing multiple communities?”

Potentially, yes. Which is why you need to be thoughtful about how many you launch and how you structure your time. I’m not in all my communities all day. I have rhythms and boundaries. The communities run themselves more than you’d think.

“Can’t I just do all of this on Substack?”

You can try. Substack’s adding more community features all the time. But it’s still fundamentally a writing platform with community bolted on. If deep community is central to what you’re building, Skool is purpose-built for that in a way Substack isn’t.

“Can’t I just do all of this on Skool?”

Again, you can try. But Skool has no discovery mechanism. You’ll need to drive traffic from somewhere. You’ll need to build trust before people pay for access. Substack solves that problem elegantly.

The Bottom Line

I use both platforms because they’re good at different things.

Substack is where I write, build trust, and reach new people.

Skool is where I build community, facilitate transformation, and create deeper value.

Neither platform is “better.” They’re just different. And when you stop trying to force one platform to do everything and instead let each platform do what it does best, the whole thing works surprisingly well.

Could this change? Absolutely. Both platforms are evolving. Maybe Substack will get brilliant at community. Maybe Skool will figure out discovery. Maybe some new platform will come along and do both things better.

But for now, in late 2025, this combination works.

It works across multiple niches. It works for both free and paid offerings. It works without requiring a massive team or complicated tech stack.

Most importantly, it works without sacrificing the quality of either the writing or the community. I’m not half-assing two things. I’m doing two things well, because each platform is designed to support exactly what I’m trying to do.

If you’re building something similar, multiple communities, multiple newsletters, multiple niches, I’d encourage you to consider this approach.

Stop trying to find the one perfect platform. Start thinking about how different platforms can work together to support your overall strategy.

You might be surprised at how well it works.

See you there…

Until Next Time