Are you looking for a marketing leader that can build a content and brand marketing strategy from the ground? How about a strategy to launch a new product? Or a leader who can actively contribute to the business as a whole – beyond marketing? No need to look further. Here’s how I did just that with Nashville Software School.
In 2017, the coding bootcamp industry was booming. But over the next couple of years, several notable bootcamps scaled too fast, didn’t meet shareholder expectations, and closed their doors. This is the story of how marketing played a pivotal role in Nashville Software School’s (NSS) growth and ability to outshine and outlast its competitors from 2017 to 2022.
When I started at NSS in 2017, their marketing consisted of the occasional blog post, a semi-regular newsletter, graduate stories recorded on a podcast, and a monthly informational session. I was hired to take these elements and build a content marketing strategy from the ground up with a limited budget. I started as the marketing manager and was promoted 18 months later to Director of Marketing & Communications and joined the newly created senior leadership team for the organization.
Here are some of my highlights.
Nashville Software School (NSS) has been very intentional about growth, only growing as fast as graduates could get jobs. NSS believes that “our job is not done until [the graduate] gets [their] first job in tech.” This means NSS’s relationships with employers is just as important as its relationship with students.
NSS’s Founder/CEO and COO are successful tech entrepreneurs, so it’s no surprise they carried over that experience and run NSS more like a start-up than a non-profit. For the first 8 years, NSS was bootstrapped and received very few donations and no grant money. NSS runs lean. This meant a small marketing budget and always prioritizing a growing wishlist of opportunities.
NSS has a unique financial model due to a deferred tuition plan that serves approximately 50% of its students. Opportunity Tuition defers most of a student's tuition until after they graduate and get a job. When both conditions are met, a graduate will start an interest-free monthly tuition repayment, similar to a SaaS recurring payment model, except the students have already benefited from the service.
Back in 2017, NSS only taught Web Development. Since then NSS has launched several new programs, including Data Science, Data Analytics, Software Engineering, and introductory classes. With each new program, I was responsible for learning the new domain and ensuring the marketing team had the domain knowledge to write copy for the program pages, blog content, and social media.
If you like what you see and want to work together, get in touch!
linkedin.com/in/mandyarola
