TOC Coach: How J.P. Nerbun Built a 1,422-Member Skool Community for Coaches at $17 a Month

TOC Coach has 1,422 members paying from $17 a month, which makes it one of the largest rosters in the Sports category of the Skool leaderboard. It gets there by selling to the coach rather than the athlete. Nobody inside is trying to improve their own jump shot; they are trying to run a better team, and that changes the economics of everything, because a coach buys professional development out of a different mental budget than a player buys training. There is also a deadline on the page that expired two and a half months ago, which is the most instructive thing on it.

The founder

J.P. Nerbun

His Skool bio reads "Author of The Culture System, Host of Coaching Culture Podcast, Father of 3 Kids, Live in Ireland." Two of those four items are audience-building assets that existed before the community did, which is the whole reason a $17 product can reach four figures of members.

A book and a podcast are the two most efficient credibility instruments in coaching education, because both are consumed by exactly the person who would join. The podcast in particular does the job a paid ad would otherwise do: it runs continuously, it costs nothing per listener, and someone who has heard forty episodes needs no convincing about whether the host knows the subject. By the time they see a $17 price, the decision has already been made elsewhere.

What TOC Coach sells

The copy is compact and structured around three named pillars. Below it is word for word, with the key moves numbered. Hover a number to see what each line is doing.

How they sell

The three-pillar structure is the load-bearing decision. Courses, live coaching and community are not features, they are three different learning preferences, and naming them separately lets a reader self-select on format rather than on topic. A coach who will never attend a live call still sees a self-paced path. A coach who never finishes a course still sees monthly deep dives. Neither has to read the whole page to know they are catered for.

The second decision is the tier tease. "Culture Captain Course - Available to Premium Members" appears above the description of the community itself, which means the upgrade is being sold before the base membership has been. A reader arrives already aware that $17 is the entry point and not the ceiling, so the eventual upgrade prompt is a confirmation rather than a surprise. That is a cleaner sequence than most tiered communities manage.

The third is the dual address in "whether you're here to level up or lead others." Coaching education splits sharply between people improving their own practice and people responsible for other coaches, and most communities pick one and lose the other. One clause here keeps both.

The expired deadline

The last line of the page reads "Prices go up June 1st, join now to lock in current pricing." It was read in the third week of August. The deadline is roughly eleven weeks stale.

This is worth more study than any of the things the page does well, because it is the single most common unforced error in community copy and it is invisible to the owner. Scarcity is the one element on a sales page with an expiry date built in, and an expired one inverts its own function. A reader who notices does not think "I missed it," they think "nobody has looked at this page in months," and that doubt attaches to the freshness of the courses, the frequency of the live calls and everything else they cannot verify.

The contrast with the same tactic done well is stark. The Practice HQ triggers its price rise at 500 members rather than a date, and Skool prints the live member count on the same page, so the deadline updates itself and can never go stale. Lewis Sheward's running community does the same at 145 members. A member-count trigger is strictly better than a calendar date on Skool, because the platform maintains it for you.

Selling to coaches, not athletes

The B2B move is the reason a $17 product supports 1,422 members. A coach buying professional development is spending against a career budget, often reimbursable, and their alternative is a conference ticket or a certification costing several hundred dollars. Against that comparison, $17 a month barely registers as a decision.

The delivery load is also lower than it looks. Coaches are a self-serving audience: they arrive able to run a discussion, willing to answer each other, and comfortable in a professional forum. That is why an engaged community can be listed as a deliverable rather than an aspiration at this scale. The Arte of Coaching Kids BJJ runs the same B2B logic in a narrower sport at $10 a month, which suggests the pattern travels well below this price point too.

The trade is that the addressable market is a fraction of the athlete market, and the buyer is harder to reach cold. It only works if you already have a way to talk to coaches at volume, which is precisely what a book and a long-running podcast provide.

The funnel, step by step

The formula you can copy

Name your delivery formats, not your features. Courses, coaching and community lets a reader self-select on how they learn in about five seconds, which is faster than any feature list.

Tease the upgrade before you sell the entry. Putting a named premium asset above the description means the tier structure is understood from the first paragraph rather than discovered later as an upsell.

Address both halves of your audience in one clause. Practitioners and the people who lead practitioners rarely feel welcome on the same page unless you say so explicitly.

Sell to the professional, not the participant, when a professional version of your audience exists. They spend from a career budget, they compare you to a conference ticket, and they can hold a discussion without you in the room. Then check every dated claim on your page this week. See how to write a Skool about page and how to price a Skool community.

Frequently asked questions

What is TOC Coach?

A private Skool community founded by J.P. Nerbun for coaches and leaders, with 1,422 members from $17 per month and a premium tier above it. It combines self-paced courses on leadership, culture-building and coaching tools, live trainings with monthly deep dives, and a peer community, plus named premium courses such as the Culture Captain Course. It sits around rank 47 in the Sports category of the Skool leaderboard.

Who is J.P. Nerbun?

The founder of TOC Coach. His Skool bio describes him as the author of The Culture System, host of the Coaching Culture Podcast, a father of three, and resident in Ireland. The book and podcast are the audience assets that feed the community.

How do you build team culture in sports?

The premise this community is built on is that culture is a coach's skill rather than a team's mood, so the work starts with the coach's own leadership behaviour and only then moves to the team environment. In practice that means defining standards the coach models first, giving senior athletes explicit leadership roles, and treating culture as something reviewed regularly rather than announced once at the start of a season. The community's own tagline sequences it as better coaches, then better leaders, then better culture.

Is a $17 community worth it for a coach?

The relevant comparison is not other online communities, it is what a coach normally spends on professional development. Set against a conference ticket or a certification costing several hundred dollars, a monthly membership with courses and live sessions is a low-stakes trial. Whether it delivers depends on how much of the live programming you actually attend, which is the same variable that decides the value of any coaching education.

Why does the about page mention a June 1st price rise?

That line appears on the live page as written and had already passed when this breakdown was researched in August 2026. It is quoted here exactly, and it is the clearest example we have found of why a dated deadline is a liability on a Skool about page. Current pricing should be checked on the live page.

What is the lesson for other community builders?

Two. First, selling to the professional version of your audience raises what they can pay and lowers what you have to deliver, because professionals compare you to conferences and can run a discussion themselves. Second, tie every urgency claim to a number the platform maintains for you, such as the member count Skool prints on your page, rather than to a date you will forget to update.