I built my own version of Skool directly on the blockchain with Claude and the ICP. Why is this important? Well, if you're a content creator, one of the main ways to monetize is to have a community and to be able to have a platform where you can sell. Now, I just launched a Skool a couple of months ago. I'm glad we got 27 members in there, but there's a big problem with Skool: they control everything. I want to accept payments in crypto — I'd have to set that up somewhere else, take the payments, and give people coupons. If they decide they don't like me, they could just ban my whole account like Udemy did. And there's only the functionality they build in. They've got a nice community, a classroom, a members map, leaderboards — which is cool — and direct messaging. But then I have to pay $100 a month to keep my community active on there with all the features, and the payments all go through them as well. On top of that, if I want to add stuff — say I want to put audiobooks in there, or I want to sell calls directly so people can buy them, or I want to actually have control of it myself and be able to customize every single thing — I can't do all that on Skool.
Why Building It Yourself Just Became Possible
In the past, it has been impossible to just go through and try to build something like this yourself without paying a developer huge amounts of money. Even if you use platforms like Lovable or Replit, they have extremely limited functionality. One single update could break your entire existing website. They are insecure. The platform totally owns you. So there's a new solution that has emerged using Internet Computer Protocol, which is a new infrastructure to build the internet on via blockchain — unmatched technology. And Claude Code has finally made it so you can easily build. What I've built is just what I've started building in the last week, and what's amazing is how Claude Code keeps iterating.
I have my website at jerrybanfield.com. In the past, all I did was send people straight over to my Skool, and I was doing all this work to put the traffic to jerrybanfield.com — then I was losing a significant percentage because of people literally needing to click one button to go to another website. And again, I've been banned and demonetized enough times in the last 15 years as a content creator to know that bans and demonetizations are often not fair, and they come right when you go viral. It doesn't even matter if you're following the rules or not — if they don't like you, they can take your profile down for any reason at all. They have total control. I've learned: don't build your business on somebody else's business.
A Tour of What I Built
So I finally got this set up where now, when you go to my website, for all the people who are brand new and found me some other way, it's got my YouTube channels to start with. Then, for some gamification and some showing off among the top supporters, I put up a leaderboard where you can show off how much money you've spent on my website — and I show this in, like, every one of my videos. I'm grateful that literally two people tipped me today, and a third one tipped also who's not on there because I didn't have the sign-in process yet. What's amazing is that Internet Computer Protocol allows you to do one single sign-in. Some of the products have a Buy Now button, and when you click on Buy Now, some of these will take you to the sign-in page. I still sell my Skool community on my site for people who already use Skool and want that, but I've got total control of what I offer. I can offer shirts — and nobody's going to censor my content either.
I'm going to put some of my stand-up comedy on my site, and that would potentially be a problem on Skool: one hater gets in there, reports my comedy, Skool doesn't like it, and they take my whole platform down. On my site, there's nobody to report it to. I'm hosted straight on the blockchain and can't be censored without a motion directly on the blockchain to censor me, which is realistically going to be difficult over something like somebody not liking my comedy. And on Stripe, if something happened with my payment processing, I could just rotate another processor in — that's not a big deal — and I take payments directly in crypto for all of these also.
Now, it takes some work, and I'm on the $200-a-month Claude plan, but literally I could cancel the Skool Pro version at some point and put that money back toward the Claude plan. What's incredible is how I can build this and iterate on it over time. This public leaderboard is awesome for social proof — in the last week there have already been three people buying the chat membership. I've got it set up right now so that if you go to jerrybanfield.com/chat and you're not actually in it, it sells you on joining the family with lifetime access, and I just change all the headlines and everything with Claude however I want to. You can pay with Stripe, and you can pay with ICP, which is awesome because a lot of my audience has ICP and wants to use it, while the other half from all over the place wants to pay with a card. Unlike Skool, where you couldn't pay with ICP, I've got both. If you're already a member, there's a built-in sign-in, and I don't have to manage it — the sign-in is already set up straight on the blockchain.
There's no censorship on the chat either. There's no third party that can come in and censor the conversations — I'm not even sure anyone can see the conversations I'm having with my community without buying in. I built this up, and then I decided: cool, I want emojis. I literally just told Claude to put emojis in there — boom, it puts them in there. The chat also ranks you on the leaderboard by how much money you've spent, a cool little feature I put on there. I can build this out so it has different channels. I can build out direct messages if I want to. I literally have total control. I started off with plain text, then I added images, and in the future, if I wanted to put MP3 files in there, I could do that also.
Then I have a dedicated leaderboard page, the site pulls across all my blog posts, and I have a dedicated tip page. That's $40 I made in tips in the last two days, and I show off my tips across all my videos — you can see the newest tips and the biggest all-time tips. This gives people a concrete way to say, "Look, I want to support Jerry" — boom, there are all the different tip options, and I'm going to put them up to $1,000.
Free Traffic and Total Ownership
On top of all of that, here's something I don't have with Skool: I want to get traffic directly to my website. I take the videos I'm putting up on YouTube, transcribe them with AI, and put them out there so all the AI programs can scrape my text, link my blog posts, and know the things I know about, so they can recommend me if they want to. Right now I've got 1,279 blog posts on this website, and Google is now sending people into my website every day for free. Those visitors are directly on my website — they don't have to go anywhere else. They can immediately click on call options, get lifetime access to the chat, and join the family in the community. This is all fully customizable, and the blog posts are fully automatic — I just drop videos in a folder. This is game-changing technology for content creators.
Because if you're a YouTuber, you've often been getting ripped off by third parties. Maybe it wasn't a rip-off back then, but I certainly felt like it when I added tens of millions of dollars to Udemy's company valuation, introduced millions of people to Udemy.com for the first time, and made millions of dollars of sales on their platform — then they banned me and stopped all their payments to me, but they kept all the hundreds of thousands of people who signed up for Udemy because of my YouTube videos, my ads, my website, and my email list. They kept all those customers for themselves, and they cut me out. With my website, nobody's going to do that to me ever again. I have everybody here, and all my sources from all my social media send people to a full page of everything — I don't have to use some link tree to get people to go somewhere. And then I have merchandise. I can sell whatever I want on my site, and that's a huge deal.
Games, Courses, and Everything on One Website
Oh, and I have games on my site also. I'm making games with AI — I made a blockchain zombies game that you can just hop into and play. I made some games just to test, but I'm going to make some games and then charge for them — the games will be like $10 — all on one single website. And then I'll put video courses up. I may host some of them as unlisted YouTube videos, because right now on ICP you can easily host MP3 files — it costs about $5 per gigabyte, but that's replicated storage. Literally, as I write this, I've been playing a game I built with AI that's directly on my website. Anybody can play for free, and it's got perks and everything. It's on the same website as my books, my courses, and my community.
Everybody's got a profile on my website too. Everyone has a public profile where they can link out to their other stuff, and on their profiles they also have the ability to show off all the things they've bought. This is outstanding for social proof and competition, because it only takes one or two people deciding they want to be at the top of the leaderboard — they drop some extra tips, they buy some extra calls, and they take pride in having one of those leaderboard spots. On one member's profile, if you click on it, you can see which products he has bought — his purchases from jerrybanfield.com/chat are listed right there. And I give people an option: you can hide your purchases. If you don't want people to know you bought my audiobook or time with me, or that you tipped, that's an option there.
A Full Business System Instead of Skool
This is incredible, because it's a full business system instead of a Skool. The guys at Skool were saying that to get the best results, you should send everybody to your Skool from all your Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok — send them all to your Skool. But of course they say that: it's their platform, and they want to make the most money possible. While yes, that might work in the short term, in the long term I want to send everybody to jerrybanfield.com, because jerrybanfield.com is mine. Outside of getting put on some crazy watch list, that site is hard to mess with. What's important over the long term is that you build your business as a content creator on a rock-solid foundation that's not easily cancelable — because you piss off one person at one company and they decide to wipe out your whole business, like Udemy did to me. Then you've got to rebuild, and you build somewhere else, and that goes downhill, and you rebuild again. Over the last decade I've rebuilt in at least five different places — from Udemy to Steam to YouTube to Facebook Gaming to trying to have things on my own website, and most recently Skool. You've got to have all of this yourself.
What I'm going to do next is make a course showing how I build all this and the key things you need to know. It'll have video tutorials that walk through the essential steps and get into the more technical details, and I'll put that on my website. This whole build is documented across the videos in my ICP Crypto playlist if you want to follow along with how it comes together. But if you just want to chat, or you want to screen-share and set up Claude, you can schedule a call with me and just share your screen and ask me questions — you could probably set up Claude and start building something like this yourself. And if you get stuck or need help, you can just go to jerrybanfield.com and talk to me now if I'm online, or schedule a Zoom call, and I'll help you get into the details of this.
I look forward to seeing you on jerrybanfield.com. Hop in the chat, have a conversation with me, try the purchasing experience, and see how it works for yourself.