How to Start a Business with No Money

Every business is different, and there is no “one-size-fits-all” solution. As you know, I don’t believe in business blueprints. I believe that businesses should be made using your unique skills, passions and resources. Building a Skool community is no different. Some people just use it to provide a simple classroom to teach people things, some use it build a community of link minded people based around a hobby or passion, and some use it as a very serious business funnel. Whilst the Skool platform is awesome, it does lack some very basic features, like even highlighting text in bold, managing calendars or sending group messages. Depending on how you use Skool, you are likely to need a very different set of tools. Unfortunately, I have noticed that whilst most developers are amazing at making great tools, they are not very good at explaining how the help us, or showing us how to use them in laymans non-tech terms. If you just read a list of software features, it can all sound like developer jargon. What you actually need to know is how these Skool community management tools will make your life easier, save you time, and put more money in your pocket. To help you decide, here is a plain-English guide explaining the main differences between the top three Skool extensions and CRMs in 2026, starting with the most affordable option. 1. The Skool Extension 🧩 Cost: 100% Free forever tier available. (Premium unlock available via free trial) Link: The Skool Extension Visual Organization & Blazing Fast Workflow If you are wondering how to organize your Skool communities because your interface feels cluttered, or you find yourself losing great posts in the feed, or you can’t remember if you’ve done enough to 🔥 keep your flame alight, then this tool cleans up your digital workspace. It is a Chrome extension that directly modifies the Skool interface to add serious quality-of-life upgrades. How the FREE Tier helps you right now: Organize Your Workspace (Community Pins): Skool’s default sidebar hides your communities behind a clunky dropdown menu. This extension replaces that with a neat strip on the left side, allowing you to drag and drop all your groups into custom, named folders (like “AI”, “Clients”, or “Networking”). Outcome: Stop digging through menus and see exactly where you need to be at a glance. Never Lose Great Content (Bookmarks): Adds a small bookmark icon to every post, lesson, and individual comment. Outcome: Instantly save valuable content into a dedicated, drag-and-drop sidebar so you can reference it later without endlessly scrolling through the feed to find it again. Work Faster (Keyboard Shortcuts): Move through Skool entirely without a mouse. Set up custom key combos to open your Calendar, Members panel, or the Stream. It even includes a “Tool search” box to find things instantly.Outcome: Save hours of micro-clicks over a month by navigating your community like a power user. Save Your Eyes (Dark / Light Mode Toggle): Adds a simple sun/moon icon to your top navigation bar for a one-click theme switch.Outcome: Instantly switch to dark mode for late-night sessions without having to dig through settings or manually reload the page. Discover Competitors (Skool Finder): Access to an advanced community discovery tool with unique sorting functions and specialized filters.Outcome: Easily research other communities in your niche or find groups with specific stats. The Ultimate Quality-of-Life Toolkit:And so much more including: Unread filter, Fade read posts, Wide post composer, Bookmark Icon, Text Editor Functions, Voice + Video Messages, Chat Read Receipts, Wide Chat, Search messages, Auto Focus, Auto Blur, Mute Button, Raise Hand, Call timer, Cat music, Max Video Quality, Messages, Skool Notifications, Group Chat, Event Reminders, Community Pins, Right-Click Menus, Favorite Communities, Community translation, Community Stats, and a Global Leaderboard. ALL FREE!Outcome: You get an arsenal of subtle, yet powerful enhancements that completely upgrade your daily communication, video calls, and navigation, making the entire platform feel instantly more premium and tailored to your exact workflow. How the PREMIUM Tier (”Skool Game Next Level”) scales your business: Know Your Numbers Instantly (Admin Stats): Adds a customizable row of key business metrics (like MRR, Retention, Conversion Rate, and Active Members) directly below the existing stats on your community’s About page.Outcome: View your financial performance and growth at a glance without ever having to dig through the standard admin dashboards. Post While You Sleep (Schedule Posts): Adds a “Schedule” button so you can write a post today and it publishes automatically at your chosen date and time, even if your browser is closed. You can also set posts to repeat daily, weekly, or monthly.Outcome: Maintain consistent community engagement without having to manually log in and post every single day. Never Lose a Lead (Sales Pipeline & CRM Profiles): Unlocks a full sales pipeline to track leads through clear stages, alongside detailed CRM profiles where you can leave notes, tag members, and view their full history.Outcome: Treat your community like a professional sales funnel so no potential client ever slips through the cracks. Message at Scale (Advanced Member List): Upgrades your member list to let you filter, sort, and message hundreds of members at once.Outcome: Skip the tedious hassle of messaging people one by one when you need to make important announcements or targeted offers. Enhance Student Accountability (Course Checklists & Live Call Tracking): Adds step-by-step checklists to guide members through courses and automatically tracks exactly who attended your live calls.Outcome: Easily identify which members are taking action and which ones need a nudge, vastly improving your group’s success rate and retention. Put Routine Tasks on Autopilot (Automations & AI Integrations): Provides no-code workflows for repetitive tasks, plus a REST API and MCP Server that allows AI assistants to read and manage your community data.Outcome: Reclaim hours of your week by letting software and AI handle your most tedious admin work, without needing ANY technical knowledge. For example, you could just say to your chatbot – “Organise my classroom module xx into a more logical flow” or

If you are transitioning from the 9-to-5 grind to running your own show, there is a massive mental hurdle you have to clear. We are completely programmed by the employment system to believe that our time is worth X amount per hour. Because of this conditioning, when we start out on our own, we feel like we can’t possibly ask for more than that hourly rate. But no. It’s always about the VALUE. When you sell a product, the price tag isn’t just a simple equation of material costs + overheads (like rent, staff, bills, and tool depreciation) + the time it took to make it. You also have to factor in all the years of experimentation, the messy mistakes, and the epic failures it took for you to get to this final, polished product. I failed miserably over and over again in my twenties before I finally figured out how to make things stick. Those failures are part of the value. So, yes, some things we sell for £50 might only cost £2 in raw materials to make, but they are worth £50 because of the hidden “sweat equity” and expertise and years of learning the skills behind them. How much is a haircut worth? Let’s look at the service industry. Some high-street barbers charge £5 for a haircut, whilst elite salons charge £500. Is the £500 haircut exactly 100 times better? Probably not. But the value is built around a highly personal, professional service, and an experience that makes the client feel luxurious and deserving. They aren’t paying for 30 minutes of scissor work; they are paying for how the experience makes them feel. To truly understand how disconnected price is from raw materials or time, just ask yourself: What’s the value of a bottle of water? At home from the tap: Practically zero Out and about at a corner shop: £1 At a music festival: £2 At an airport after security: £3 In the desert, when you are severely dehydrated: Your life savings. It is the exact same bottle of water. The only thing that changes is the context and the urgency of the problem it solves. As I say in my book, business, put simply, is just an exchange of value. You don’t need to work 80 hours a week to make a living, and you certainly don’t need to tie your income to the clock. If you can solve a high-value problem for someone, they won’t care if it took you five hours or five minutes to fix it. You need to get out of the employee mindset. Stop trading your time for low-value rewards, because just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should. If you want to build a business that actually gives you freedom, you have to work smarter and not harder. I was always taught that working hard will reap me rewards, but I can verify that this is not true. I have seen other people work a LOT harder and longer hours than me, and on much less money. Look around you and figure out what unique problems you can solve using the skills you already have. Stop pricing yourself based on the clock, and start pricing yourself based on the transformation and the value you bring to the table.

I thought I knew the game after my first successful Facebook community, Hand Made in Cornwall, but when I tried to do the same last year for my Start a Business with No Money Community, my second attempt flopped. Epically! It turns out it was the best thing that could have happened. Last year, I joined a paid AI course hosted on Skool. I immediately noticed something different: undivided, loyal attention. These weren’t just followers; they were ambassadors! Which would you rather? Would you rather pitch to a distracted auditorium of a million people, or a room of 5,000 friends hooked on your every word? I’ve seen entrepreneurs lose everything on meta recently. Years of content and monthly earnings, just because a sensitive algorithm flagged a keyword. Some even deal with bad actors sending bots to tank their pages. On borrowed platforms like Instagram, you can’t even talk to a human to get your life’s work back. I made a friend that I met from the AI community, who I was building with and watched and supported her move her strategy from an Instagram AI avatar with around 200 followers to a Skool community, Revenue Revolution to grow to over 10,000 members in about 9 months and it’s still thriving. I nearly didn’t go to Skool. Everyone who knows me, knows that I hate spending money on anything. Especially subscriptions. Then I almost settled for a $9 hobby plan because the $99 fee felt too high for hosting a FREE community. After much consideration I decided to go all in anyway, and give it three months before expecting any return, and now I already earn five times that monthly cost after just six weeks. There is a big difference between spending money, and knowing where to invest it wisely. Why the Facebook flop was a blessing Direct Access: I own my members’ email addresses. True Loyalty: I have brand ambassadors, not just “scrollers.” Extra Income: I earn affiliate revenue through Skool introductions. Real Connection: I’ve met thousands of inspiring entrepreneurs and made proper connections and collaborations with. None of this would have been possible on Facebook groups, or even any of the bigger community building groups like Circle. The numbers show exactly why this works. Small, specialized communities with highly engaged members actually outperform massive, passive audiences. Skool’s built-in gamification, like points and leaderboards also keeps members coming back, with gamified communities retaining members at significantly higher rates. If you also combine this with the power of health check, automated DM’S and more with Goosify’s Wingman*, and the FREE Skool Extension then you have a superpowered Skool community. (*As an official Wingman Operator, I can get you very special prices and free setup and lifetime training too. Just join through my link above to qualify) Because of the move to Skool, I own my members’ email addresses, I have incredibly loyal brand ambassadors, I earn extra affiliate income from introducing others to the platform, and I’ve connected with thousands of like-minded entrepreneurs. The Honest Comparison: Skool vs. Facebook Groups Ready to get to work? Join our How to Start a Business with No Money Skool Community. You will get immediate access to 20 Resident Experts, daily live events, and a network of action-takers actively building their businesses from absolute zero. Come introduce yourself in the Welcome Lounge. It’s free! (obviously) Feeling inspired to build your own audience? If you want to stop building on borrowed land and want to create your own highly engaged community, Click here to start your own Skool Community. This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Welcome to the very first post of How To Start A Business With No Money. If you don’t know me from Adam, allow me to introduce myself.I’m a successful founder, but I didn’t exist online Last year, I wrote a book called How to Start a Business with no Money. I was flying along, submitting it to my publisher, until they hit me with one of their final questions: “Are you able to sell any of your books yourself?” I was unable to honestly answer yes to that question. If people searched for me online, I simply didn’t exist. Yes, I am the company director of a couple of companies, and a landlord of multiple properties, but that’s about all they will find out. They might find a few social media posts where an awful picture of me has been tagged in some other people’s pictures on Facebook, but that’s about it. It sent me down this exciting rabbit hole…. Now it’s all good and well me talking about how to start a business with no money, but I wanted to lead by example and actually do the things too. After writing the book, I thought it would be a great idea to start my coaching business with absolutely no money, as both a personal challenge and to prove that it can be done. As I mention in the book, I’m a bit of a hedonist, I don’t HAVE to “work” and I really value my free time, so building this had to fit around my life. So last year, I dedicated 90 days to learning exactly how to make myself known online as a key person of influence. I spent my time studying social media, community platforms, and strategies to put myself out there to get the skills I needed, and get out of my comfort zone and face my fear of putting myself in front of a camera.That 90 days soon rolled into about 270 days, but such is life. The key is to commit and start! So far, I have been building this part-time around my other commitments and my hedonist lifestyle, and I’m about $200 up. I earned that initial money through affiliate marketing, which is the perfect zero-risk sales model. I took that money and put it straight back into a couple of courses I needed to learn new skills fast, and invested in building my Skool community. It’s not even difficult, and costs nothing to start. For example, you could just recommend joining my free Skool community to people you know online and earn 40% per month (of $97 / $297) when someone chooses to spend money with me. Best of all? I have pre-sold several books now, and can return to my publisher with a very proud… Yes! This Substack is where I’ll be documenting the whole journey. I’ll be sharing the exact strategies, the free tools, and the unfiltered realities of building an online brand and business from absolute zero. Substack is free, and if your still sat on the fence wondering why people aren’t buying your things, is because they don’t know they can trust you yet. By writing in this space, it’s another place you can let your people get to know you. People buy from people they know, like and trust. Subscribe (for free) to follow along, let’s learn together and get started! Subscribe now PS – You can pre-order my book How to Start a Business with no Money right now, get 40% off, and get your name printed inside the book. You can even get it signed by me too. 😁