Side Project — MIA Academy
The applied learning arm of Marketing In Action
Practical marketing programs, including the flagship Bootcamp and a few other paid products. I built the lessons, website, offers, sales pages, and the system that fills every group.
What It Is
MIA Academy is the teaching arm of Marketing In Action. Its flagship is a 13-week Bootcamp that teaches product and growth marketing by giving people real work to do, alongside a few shorter paid products on specific skills. Three new Bootcamp groups start every year, each with live sessions and its own private community.
Why I Built It
Most of my career, I was the first marketing hire, figuring things out alone with real consequences for every decision. I got through it by documenting what worked, studying people like Brian Balfour, Emily Kramer, and Julian Shapiro, and turning what I learned into my own playbooks, which became the MIA newsletter. But reading a playbook and being able to actually use it under messy, real-world pressure are two different skills. A framework tells you what good looks like. Only practice, feedback, and doing it again and again turns that into judgment you can trust. MIA Academy is the part that closes that gap.
What It Does
I run the whole thing myself: the lessons, the website, when each new group starts, the emails people get after they buy, and the ads and posts that get people to sign up. Selar handles the actual payment. Everything else, from the landing page to the follow-up emails, is mine to build and run. Launching the Academy also pushed me into press and paid placements I hadn't done before, getting MIA covered on platforms like TechCabal and Condia (Benjamin Dada's newsletter), and being named one of Africa's Top 20 Marketing Leaders for 2025 by APMP.
What It Taught Me
Teaching this stuff for a living forced me to get specific about things I used to explain in general terms. Pricing two tiers of the same Bootcamp showed me why a WhatsApp group can matter as much as the lessons themselves. Selling my own paid products through Selar taught me what a stranger will actually pay for and how to write a guarantee. It also taught me to judge an offer by real sales numbers, not likes and views. Getting press coverage for my own product taught me how PR actually works when you're pitching yourself, not someone else. And because every new group needs fresh content, I test every hook and headline with my own audience first.
Want something like this?
I'm open to full-time or in-house work where you need an ongoing plan or someone to lead marketing for the long term. I also offer specific marketing and sales services for teams that need help with the work itself: marketinginaction.xyz/services.