How Jennifer Chou Scaled to 60,000 Subscribers in Under 1 Year

Ever thought about launching your own newsletter?

Maybe one day you’ll quit your job and build your own newsletter business from the ground up?

Well, you may not have to. If given the right opportunity at the right company, you could build one as a part of your job.

That’s exactly what Jennifer Chou did while working at her tech education job.

And in less than a year, she built and grew her newsletter to over 60,000 subscribers!

We recently sat down with Jennifer Chou, growth marketer at EntryLevel and co-creator of EntryLevel’s newsletter, Level Up, to discuss how she fast-tracked her audience growth and built a successful newsletter in under a year.

Jennifer was happy to share how she was able to leverage her position, her expertise in marketing, and the opportunity to capitalize on new growth initiatives to double-down on audience growth. She shared plenty of golden nuggets about her content strategy, optimization techniques, and engagement tips that helped her build a tight-knit community.

If you’re thinking of starting your own newsletter, or you’re looking to tap into proven growth tactics, then keep reading. Jennifer’s story is unique in that she successfully built and scaled a newsletter within her company rather than launching her own. In this creator spotlight, you’ll learn how to build a newsletter on your own, or at your workplace, by using the right strategies.

Want to watch the complete interview with Jennifer Chou? Check out the video below.

EntryLevel: A Unique Model for Online Tech Courses

Jennifer’s story begins with her workplace: EntryLevel.

She shared, “I’m currently the growth marketer at EntryLevel, which is separate from our newsletter. EntryLevel is an online education business, and we teach people tech skills like product management, UX design, digital marketing, data analysis, venture capital analysis, and a bunch of other tech skills.”

EntryLevel stands out in the online course space by offering a unique model: you pay for a course, but get your money back if you complete it on time.

While this may seem like a strange business model, it works well. EntryLevel is able to boast 40% course completion rates while the average online course only gets about 2% completions. This means their students are actually learning and benefiting from the programs they offer. Ultimately, EntryLevel is able to help anyone in tech improve their skill sets, land better jobs, and accelerate their career.

The Level Up Origin Story: Zero to 60,000 Subscribers

As the growth marketer for EntryLevel, Jennifer has one goal in mind: to grow the customer base and the brand. For many businesses, a newsletter can be a great way to not only grow your subscriber base but also create deeper relationships with your audience.

As EntryLevel is an online course business in the tech industry, Jennifer’s main content strategy with the newsletter is to showcase EntryLevel’s thought leadership by offering advice on how people can advance their careers in tech.

Jennifer shared, “The newsletter is our weekly tips for breaking into a tech career for all of the people who signed up for one of our courses. EntryLevel has been going since 2020, but the newsletter itself started in July 2022. It hasn't even been a year yet.”

One of the best ways to quickly grow a newsletter audience is to leverage a pre-existing social media presence. In EntryLevel’s case, they had a LinkedIn following, so Jennifer tapped into it to boost initial subscriber growth.

She shared, “We ran a giveaway for our EntryLevel audience, where we gave away a free course if people tagged everyone in the LinkedIn comments and got everyone to subscribe. We got a ton of subscribers that way. Everybody who signs up for one of our courses on our websites gets auto-subscribed to our newsletter as well.”

If you offer online courses (or any type of membership), automatically subscribing new members to your newsletter is a great way to build your email list fast. This is a similar strategy Kernal uses as well, as seen in this Creator Spotlight we did with Joel Hansen.

While many people are getting the newsletter as a byproduct of the course they signed up for, not all subscribers are there because of the courses. They’re there for the newsletter content.

Jennifer shared, “As soon as they give us their email and sign up, we have a whole marketing funnel for them. After that, they just get the weekly career tips. It's very interesting because we have people who are huge fans of us because of our newsletter, but they've never bought a course with us before. They're always promoting our courses to their friends because they're like, ‘These people know what they're doing because of the thought leadership in the newsletter.’ But they, themselves, have never paid us or anything.”

What Jennifer has tapped into is a crucial benefit to running a newsletter: targeting a specific audience with great content will almost always result in organic growth. When your content is good enough, regardless of platform, people will share it.

Another way Jennifer was able to grow her list is thanks to beehiiv’s growth features. One she’s taken advantage of recently is beehiiv’s Recommendations.

She shared, “Right now we have just over 62,000 subscribers. Most of it came from people who signed up for EntryLevel. But, we did beehiiv Recommendations and we got a few hundred from other newsletters who have recommended us. I think 500 to 1,000 are just from recommendations alone.”

Split Content Strategy: Courses & Common Questions

Every successful newsletter starts with a content plan. Here’s how Jennifer strategizes her content into two primary groups.

“I like to split it up. First, there are some trends. For example, AI is a big thing right now. Sometimes I write about that, but mainly if there's something to promote in the business.”

For example, when EntryLevel was hiring, Jennifer wrote about her experience working at EntryLevel and tech startups.

Another way Jennifer approaches content is by listening to what readers are saying.

She shared, “If we don't have a lot to promote at the moment, we have common questions from students that we get all the time. Sometimes people reply to our newsletters and send them in, but most of the time it's people from our support team saying, ‘Hey, this is something that students are wondering a lot.”

More often than not, when Jennifer writes about common questions subscribers ask through the newsletter and EntryLevel events, the response is positive…