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Two things are true of all the most successful education-product creators we’ve interviewed.
Their products are cohort-based, and there’s an active community for everyone who goes through the cohorts. Aside from any specific knowledge or results, these are what would-be students pay for.
In this episode:
— Natalia Pérez-González, Assistant Editor
Building a profitable education business year by year
At 22 years old, shortly after graduating from college, Natalie Peters launched Sky Society, an eight-week accelerator for women looking to build marketing careers.
She’d never taught a class or course before, but she designed the program herself and recruited her first students through cold outreach on LinkedIn. It was 2021; the availability of entry-level marketing jobs was at its worst in a generation. Her first cohort included six people. The second included only two people.
"I had every reason to quit," Natalie told us. "I had every reason for this not to work. But I believed in it so much."
The early years were grueling. In year one, she paid herself nothing, while a lucky pandemic-era stock run (Tesla, Zoom) covered her rent. In year two, she went month-to-month, sometimes asking her landlord for rent extensions. Her product was solid — the few who took it loved it — but lacked effective distribution.
Sky Society's community element started as a Facebook group, a popular venue for mainstream creator communities at the time, but nobody joined. The unlock came when she transferred it to LinkedIn. She would later draw her first hire from the group's first 100 members.
By year four, the brand had compounded enough trust that alumni were landing jobs at big names like Chanel, Billboard, and Snapchat — and mentors from Sephora and Summer Fridays were signing on to teach the next classes.
Now, five years in, with cohorts approaching 100 women each, and with a 94% hire rate (within one year, including graduates actively looking for marketing employment), her distribution system is thriving across four parts:
A 40k-member LinkedIn group
(This is the publicly accessible group. Accelerator alumni join a private Slack community, where they stay active and engaged post-graduation.)
A weekly job board that gets reshared 50 to 100 times per post, and converts at 23% (to accelerator applications)
A 50k-subscriber newsletter clearing 60% open rates
The newsletter has grown largely through the job boards, which are behind email gates
A 200-plus-episode podcast originally launched to interview marketing coordinators at big brands
At four cohorts a year and $7,400 per seat, by the time they’re able to serve 100 students per cohort, Sky Society could be bringing in around $3 million per year.
All of this growth is organic — Sky Society has never run a paid ad. The business has six full-time employees and one part-time employee, including an admissions lead who runs the mentor program and two account executives who run sales. They work out of an office in Austin, having signed the lease earlier this year. Natalie still hosts the podcast, takes every applicant's first call, and approves the newsletter.
@skysociety.co Your sign to make a marketing portfolio! All of these were made by students/grads of Sky Society Accelerator, our marketing bootcamp for ... See more
The endgame, in her words: "Right now, you want to go get your education from Harvard because that means something. My goal is that getting it from Sky Society means just as much within marketing."
Connect with Natalie on LinkedIn.
Subscribe to Sky Society’s newsletter.
Learn more about Sky Society.
The two-part LinkedIn engine that builds $7K cohorts
From your Assistant Editor, Natalia Pérez-González — a couple of ideas that stuck with me as I listened through this week’s conversation ✍️.
At the core of the Sky Society funnel are two parts working in sequence: a private LinkedIn group that gathers the audience, and a weekly public job board that converts it.
It’s a clean two-part system worth emulating for any creator selling a high-ticket education or service product: build the gathering place where trust accrues, then build a recurring useful artifact that turns that reach into a pipeline.
Part 1: The private LinkedIn group — the gathering
Sky Society's group is application-only. Every member is approved by Natalie's team, keeping the group curated and free of bots. It currently sits at 40k members.
Three content types do almost all the engagement work: a weekly job board, "introduce yourself / share your LinkedIn" prompts, and free virtual events.
The events are the trust-builder. A recent one drew 1,000 RSVPs and ~500 live attendees — and they're hosted by current accelerator students, not Natalie. The audience then gets to watch the program's quality and payout in real time, led by the women enrolled in it.
Part 2: The weekly job board — the conversion
Every Tuesday, Sky Society posts 20 curated marketing jobs publicly on LinkedIn, primarily through Natalie's personal feed (51k followers), which routinely beats the company page and the group’s on reach with identical content.
Each post gets reshared 50–100 times. Click through, and you hit the gated full job board, which captures email addresses for a 50k-subscriber newsletter (60%+ open rates).
At the top of the gated board sits a banner ad for the accelerator, which converts at 23%.
The job board is a helpful teaser, a stripped-down version of the paid product. The accelerator helps women get marketing jobs; the job board helps women find them.
