We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Joanna Newton. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Joanna below.

Joanna, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Some of the most interesting parts of our journey emerge from areas where we believe something that most people in our industry do not – do you have something like that?

Virality or flashing marketing is not necessarily the path to growth!

Earlier in my career, I was interviewing for a marketing role at a startup. One of the people interviewing me was really stuck on this idea of going viral and how important that was for the growth of the business.

He wanted to know what I would do to make sure we went viral.

I told him that going viral is great, but not needed to grow a company AND that if you go viral and don’t have the proper systems and strategy in place to connect with and convert your customers that going viral will likely give you little return.

I told him that good marketing involves having the right systems in place to move the needle every day.

I don’t think he liked that answer… and somehow I still got the job, helped them build systems that sell, and then eventually helped them go viral.

All that being said, I don’t think flashy marketing is needed to have a successful business. My company, Millennial Marketer, did $500K in sales before having a website or any real social media strategy.

Joanna, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

My name is Joanna and I’ve been marketing and selling educational products at scale for almost 15 years. While working at an EdTech startup my salary was furloughed, I needed to make some extra money, and stumbled into entrepreneurship as a marketing and social media consultant.

As I worked to find clients, I realized that everyone who wanted to hire me was a course creator and therefore quickly developed my own niche. One of my clients, who is a 7-figure course creator, became my business partner for my course creation agency, Millennial Marketer.

Millennial Marketer focuses on helping subject matter experts create and sell courses using Kajabi — an all-in-one platform content creators can use to monetize their content. We help people build their programs, websites, and funnels as well as support their marketing efforts.

Can you open up about how you funded your business?

Millennial Marketer is completely bootstrapped! My co-founder and I decided not to look for funding or invest our own cash into the business.

Instead, we invested our time.

We started off by just offering hourly services and investing that money back into our business. We grew from there, started hiring folks to help, and just kept leveling up as we are able to invest more money back into the business.

We’re about to complete our third year in business and all three have been profitable.

Yes, we may have been able to grow faster with funding. But the way we have grown has really allowed us to solidify our offers, systems, and teams and now we’re ready to skyrocket in 2025.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

I had to learn (and am still learning) to not go above and beyond.

Let me explain…

At the first company I worked for, I worked myself from an entry-level field position to corporate marketing and I did that by always going above and beyond. And while that habit got me there, I realized that I hit a ceiling.

Unfortunately, in the corporate world, going above and beyond only gets you so far and you have to act differently to get into leadership roles. I had to learn how to be way more strategic to level up, and I did.

When I started my own business, I quickly went back to my old ways. Going above and beyond in the early days really did serve us well! We got great referrals, testimonials, and it really helped grow the business.

As we grew though, I realized a few things.

1. I needed time to focus on my business.

As a leader of my company, doing extra work for clients often meant not working on my company’s future and that needs to be my #1.

2. I was undervaluing my time and so were my clients.

I believe in great service and I always want to surprise and delight my customers. But when you do things out of scope, clients don’t even realize the value of what you are doing.

I’ve worked on actually adding all of the components of a project in the scope and putting value to it and when I do to something extra, I make it clear to the client that we did in fact go above and beyond.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.millennialmktr.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/joanna_atwork/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joanna-newton-510a9629/
• Other: Podcast: https://herfirst.buzzsprout.com