I landed a startup job without the necessary degree. Here’s how you can do it
“Can you read my mind?” my aunt snickered.
“No, I can’t. Psychology is not mind reading,” I said, exasperated. This must have been the 10,000th time I was saying this to someone who asked about my psychology degree.
“But seriously, what can you do with a psychology degree? Counseling?” she continued.
“Yeah. Many of us do become psychologists or work for the government. But…I don’t want to be a psychologist,” I replied.
My aunt was puzzled. In her days, their degree determined their future job. If you took an accountancy degree, it meant that you had to be an accountant. If you took an engineering degree, it meant that you had to be an engineer.
So, taking a psychology degree and not wanting to be a psychologist is bordering on blasphemy. But I already knew. I wasn’t going to be a psychologist, at least not in the foreseeable future.
Instead, I wanted to be a marketer.
Even without the relevant degree?
A quick search on Reddit shows one popular question: How can I break into the marketing industry without any marketing credentials or degree?
The good thing about the marketing and startup industries is you don’t need any credentials. You don’t need permission. Even without a business-related degree, you can still make your way working for a startup.
And I did.
In my first job, I helped launch AiraWear, the world’s first smart massaging jacket on Kickstarter. Now, I am a content marketing manager at ReferralCandy, a referral marketing tool, and CandyBar, a digital loyalty card.
So, if you want to work in marketing for a startup without a business degree, read on.
Discovering skills through job descriptions
In a 2015 blog post, Eli Overbey of HelpScout wrote about one of his most startling realizations in digital marketing. He thought he was an expert in SEO. He had watched all of Moz’s Whiteboard Fridays, followed all of the top thought leaders in SEO, read every blog post, and even started to give advice on Inbound.org.
Yet, when he applied for an SEO job for one of the top 50 websites in the world, he failed. The director of the company couldn’t even tell him why.
It was then he realized that it wasn’t because the industry wasn’t transparent about teaching. It was because the best DO NOT publish.
The top 1 percent were sitting in their roles, quietly managing and executing campaign after campaign, not concerned about publishing their latest hacks. Without being mentored by them, the only way you could get access to the kind of skills required in the job you want was to read the job descriptions.
A job description is basically a company’s avenue of giving away their rubrics to their latest project. And that’s how you should start.
Go to a jobs portal and look for marketing jobs. Read the job descriptions. What do they need you to do? What skills do they need? (You’ll also see that they mostly do not need you to have any degree.) Then, start learning those skills.
Acting on what you learned
The beautiful thing about digital marketing is that you can learn anything with a simple Google search, and then try it for yourself. The best way to learn digital marketing is NOT to consume as much knowledge as possible but to test out what you’ve learned.
As a non-business student, you might not have hundreds of case competitions underneath your belt. But you can accumulate years of experience in just a couple of months by testing out your knowledge. So, go out and market something. It can be anything — anything at all.
It could be marketing the school club you belong to, which was what I did. I implemented pricing strategies that generated US$2,900 in one semester for the club (the highest revenue the club ever received at that point.)
It could also be marketing yourself or your own website. It could be helping out your friend who is trying to get his Kickstarter project going. It could be helping your favorite chicken rice stall get more customers.
It could be helping out the hundreds of startup entrepreneurs in Singapore who are looking for talents who could help them hustle, market, and grow their user base.
There are a million things you could do to try what you’ve learned, and the key is to simply DO IT.
Documenting your journey and building your personal brand
Masters have absolute competence over their skills. However, some of these skills are invisible to the untrained eye. Without putting them on display, it is almost impossible to detect mastery. So, true mastery comprises of two portions:
- The obvious and apparent mastery of a skill
- Display of markers of mastery
As a person who is trying to break into the industry, you likely have no proven track record supporting you. However, you can actually create this track record for yourself. How? By documenting your journey.
I unwittingly did this when I decided to start a daily marketing email newsletter back when I was in university. I roped in my friends and got some of them to invite their friends to join the newsletter. I had a grand total of 15 subscribers.
It didn’t matter to me how big the audience was. It mattered that I consistently put out content about what I’ve learned and what I thought about it.
You can do the same by being a “journalist.” Document, report, analyze, and observe your own journey of transforming yourself from a person with no business degree to an accomplished marketer. Write about the books and blog posts you’ve read, podcasts you’ve listened to, videos you’ve watched, things you’ve tried, campaigns you’ve executed, and so on. Document your own journey and bring your readers along with you. Demonstrate and inspire them with how you changed yourself from a complete noob to someone who (at least) knows what he or she is talking about.
And it’s not as difficult as you think. There are plenty of platforms you can use to begin documenting your journey. You could set up your own blog by using a cheap domain registrar and host. You could write up a post a week using Medium. You could publish regularly on your personal Facebook account or LinkedIn. You could publish videos on YouTube about what you’re doing — a vlog.
As entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk says, it doesn’t matter what you do; what matters is that you start.
Paying to play
One of the most underrated strategies you can use to learn anything is the concept of “pay to play.” I learned it from my mentor Dan Meredith who successfully used this tactic to further his own business.
This is how it works:
- Find something you want to learn
- Find someone who can do what you’re learning
- Pay him or her for his/her time
- Learn and implement
It is actually a simple four-step process, yet it scares people. Paying out of your own pocket to learn a skill? Holy mackerel!
I understand the fear. Some of the courses out there cost a truckload of money, and handing over such a large sum for something where the ROI is uncertain is scary.
But think about it. If you deliberately choose the right group, your ROI can pay for itself over and over. Instead of thinking of it like a debt, think of it as an investment. In order to invest, you have to put down money and faith that it could double, triple, or even quadruple your initial investment. And it’s the same for investing in yourself.
I did this by paying to join the now-defunct Ramit’s Brain Trust. It was a mastermind group selectively filled with people who were looking for their dream careers, starting a side hustle, or beginning to build their first entrepreneurial venture.
The result of joining this group? I had a coffee chat with David Fallarme, head of growth at ReferralCandy. Two years later, he hired me to be the company’s content marketing manager.
Sending ideas to startups
Building a startup is a huge struggle. The founder is a juggler, managing everything from sales and marketing to accounting and hiring. He or she is busy, anxious, and possibly running out of ideas. And that’s where you can help.
In his book Choose Yourself, James Altucher outlined the strategy he credits for changing his entire life: The 10 Ideas-A-Day Strategy.
The concept is simple. Every day, write down 10 ideas for anything. Yes, anything. It could range from “blog post ideas you could write” to “10 gifts you can give your girlfriend,” all the way to “business ideas you could start.”
But since we’re on the topic of “how to get a job in startup marketing,” you should direct your ideation muscle to this simple question: How can company X improve its sales/double its revenue/get more users or customers? Write down 10 ideas on what they can do and send it to them, without any obligation of them returning something to you.
What is likely to happen is that:
- They thank you, and you feel good
- You build a connection with them, and even if they don’t hire you, they might recommend you to other startup founders who need your skills
- They want to hire you to implement those ideas for them
It works. This was the exact strategy Charlie Hoehn, author of Play It Away, used to get his career started interning for superstar bloggers like Tim Ferriss. So, start churning out those ideas and sending them to startups. Giving value and building your reputation as a helpful person is what you should be focusing on.
Don’t let your lack of credentials hold you back
You don’t have to be in a business or marketing school to get a job in marketing. You don’t have to be “certified.” All you need is hunger for knowledge, a willingness to experiment, and a bias toward action. Then, use the above strategies I’ve laid out, apply for a startup job, and help them grow.
You can do it.
This post was originally published on Tech In Asia.
