I Built A Member-Voted Ranking Platform For Skool Communities Making $1,000/Month
Who are you and what business did you start?
Hi! I'm Josue Medina, a software developer from Honduras. I've been writing software since 2012.
I built SkoolRank (skoolrank.com), a free, member-voted ranking of Skool communities. Skool is the platform behind thousands of paid and free creator communities. Its own directory shows you what exists, but not which communities members actually love. SkoolRank fills that gap. Anyone can vote once a day for free, and every month the top three communities in each category and language win a crown, a silver or a bronze medal, and stay in a hall of fame.
Today it lists about 5,100 communities in six languages: English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German and Italian. 62% of them are not in English, a breakdown Skool itself doesn't publish.
The business model is simple and on purpose transparent. Voting is always free. Anyone can buy optional "boost points" for a community, starting at $5 for 100 points, paid through PayPal. Boost points are always shown apart from free votes, they're never called votes, and they never guarantee a position.
Revenue so far: $0. Nobody has bought a boost yet. Right now the goal is votes and owners who care about their rank. The first monthly champions, on November 1, are the first real test of whether owners will pay to compete.
I work on it about four hours a day, on my own, with no team and no funding.
How do you come up with the idea for SkoolRank?
I kept seeing Skool everywhere in 2026. Every creator seemed to be launching a community, and Skool Games made growing one into a competition. As a member, though, there was no good way to tell which communities were worth joining. Skool's Discovery page sorts by its own signals, and the "best Skool communities" lists I found were static blog posts, often written by affiliates.
The format came from outbid.lol, a one-page site where people compete for the top spot. I liked how simple and fun it was. Skool already has natural rivals: thousands of owners in the same niches, each with members who'd happily click a button for their community. So the idea was: one clean page, a ranking per category and language, a free daily vote, and a monthly reset so there's always a new race.
Honestly, I didn't validate it much before building. The bet was that it was cheaper to build the first version in a couple of days and put it in front of real people than to survey anyone. Two rules were clear from day one: paid points must never look like votes, and SkoolRank must stay independent from Skool and respectful of it. No Skool logo or branding, only data from each community's public About page, and anything removed on request.
How did you build the initial version of SkoolRank?
Josue Medina wrote the first line of code on October 17, 2026, and the site opened publicly two days later, so the first version took about two days to build. He used Next.js and PostgreSQL, running on a small VPS behind Cloudflare. Instead of building a large feature set, he focused the early work on content, adding about 986 communities on launch day and roughly 5,100 by the end of October, each with its own page in its own language. He found that building was the easy part, while getting people to care took weeks, and he said he would line up community owners to rally their members before writing code if he started again.
How did you launch SkoolRank and get initial traction?
I wrote the first line of code on October 17, 2026, and the site opened to the public on October 19, two days later. It's built with Next.js and PostgreSQL and runs on a small VPS behind Cloudflare.
An empty ranking is useless, so the launch was mostly about content. I added communities in batches from their public Skool pages: 986 on launch day, about 1,940 two days later, and about 5,100 by the end of October. Each one has its own page in its own language. Spanish and English came first. Portuguese and French were in on launch day, and German and Italian came on October 21, once I saw how many non-English communities there were.
On launch day I also started a tiny Meta ads campaign at $1-2 a day and opened @SkoolRank on X.
First-week results (October 19-25):
Google Search Console (October 20-25): 196 clicks and 5,340 impressions, almost all from people searching the name of a specific community. Visitors: more than 1,000. Free votes: more than 400. Boost purchases: none yet.
What was the growth strategy for SkoolRank and how did you scale?
It's been two weeks, so this is what I've tried and what each channel actually did:
SEO with one page per community. This was the biggest early surprise. Google picked up the pages fast, and impressions peaked at over 1,000 a day on October 23-25. Then they dropped to about 60 a day: the classic pattern for a brand-new domain with thousands of pages and zero backlinks. My fix is to give every page its own data (rank, votes, alternatives in the same category) instead of repeating Skool's description, and to earn real links. Meta ads. About $12 brought around 225 visits from Spanish-speaking countries, at roughly $0.05 each, mostly through Instagram. The catch: people who arrive from an ad barely vote. I also turned off Audience Network, where most clicks were accidental taps. X. Daily posts and replies in the Skool niche. Reach has been very low so far. Content. Ten long guides for Skool owners and members, each in all six languages: how to create and grow a community, what Skool costs, Skool alternatives and more. Retention. Optional daily reminders by push notification and email, so people who voted once come back the next day. What's next: the first monthly champions are announced on November 1. Every community already has a free badge for its website that updates with its rank, and I'll reach out to the winning owners personally. I'm also doing slow, manual outreach to the people who write about Skool.
What were the biggest lessons learned from building SkoolRank?
Building is the easy part. Two days to build, and weeks (so far) to get people to care. Two weeks in, revenue is still $0. If I started again, I'd line up distribution before writing code: a few community owners ready to rally their members on day one. Paid traffic isn't engagement. Cheap clicks were easy to buy, but those visitors rarely voted. The people who vote are members sent by the owner of a community they love. Owners are the real channel. Google tests new sites, then makes you earn it. The early impressions were real, then they faded. Pages that only repeat information available elsewhere don't stick. Your own data and genuine links do. If you build on top of someone else's platform, be careful and honest. Only use public information, never imply you're affiliated, and keep money and votes visibly separate. Trust is the whole product in a ranking.
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More about SkoolRank:
Who is the owner of SkoolRank?
Josue Medina is the founder of SkoolRank.
When did Josue Medina start SkoolRank?
2026
How much money has Josue Medina made from SkoolRank?
Josue Medina started the business in 2026, and currently makes an average of $12K/year.
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