EntryLevel: tech skills courses for career starters at $40K a month

EntryLevel sells online tech courses with portfolio projects and certificates to people entering the workforce or reskilling for tech jobs, and it was making $40K a month at the time of founder Ajay Prakash's June 2023 interview with Starter Story.

How it started

EntryLevel started in February 2021 and is based in Sydney NSW, Australia. Ajay Prakash came to it after studying engineering and physics and running a non-profit called Real Skills, which helped nearly 10,000 students. He then spent time across e-commerce, crypto, international trade and deep tech, founding several companies along the way, not all of which worked out. Teaching and running workshops stayed a constant side pursuit.

He lost his job when COVID hit, and used the break to plan his next venture. What pulled him back into education was the World Economic Forum's goal of reskilling 1 billion people by 2030; reskilling 1 billion people by 2030 became, and has remained, EntryLevel's North Star. He decided to focus on high-volume, low-cost reskilling, and Blackbird VC backed the project.

What it sells and how it charges

The official site, fetched on 2026-09-30, is titled "EntryLevel: Reskill into a tech job in 6 weeks" and tells learners to "Get a certificate and portfolio project." Courses named on the homepage include Data Analysis using Excel and Tableau, Product Management: Fundamentals & Discovery, and UX Design Fundamentals. The site's pitch is built on hands-on projects, an active Discord community, and a certificate you can add to your resume, and it states 20,000+ happy students and 50+ experts teaching. As fetched on 2026-09-30, the site's banner announces that EntryLevel and HEX have merged.

On charging, the interview is the source. EntryLevel gives students a 100% refund if they complete a course, so that education stays accessible to people who cannot afford it; students who can afford it let the company keep their money in exchange for premium perks such as permanent access to course content. The founder frames it as a challenge: six weeks to get students to fall in love with the product. EntryLevel also applies Purchasing Power Parity pricing in emerging markets, and puts average customer value at ~$35.

How it got its first customers and what kept growth going

The first version was not a course. It was a referral waiting list system, built on Webflow with a custom Firebase referral script, and the founder credits it with viral growth at the start. Paid social then took over as the engine: "we focused on paid social media ads (primarily Facebook and Instagram) that still make up our core acquisition channels today."

The message that worked is short — "learn in 6 weeks." Clear ads beat clever ones: on a data analyst website, the ad that got the most clicks was simply "Become a data analyst" with a picture of the instructor's face. SMS looked promising and was not; paying to be promoted to thousands of SMS users in India produced a very low number of signups. The team now puts more designers than anything else into growth and tests many creatives quickly, on the view that the algorithm beats manual audience targeting. Word of mouth has come back as a channel, with 10-20% of sales now coming from it (potentially more), and the company is also investing in SEO, SEM and influencer marketing. A programmatic SEO test begun in February 2023 targeting "Best Venture Capital Analyst online courses (with certificates)" led to 6 conversions, which was enough to justify repeating the format for other courses.

The numbers

These are the figures the founder gave in the June 2023 interview. They are not current revenue.

Revenue: $40K a month, founder-reported in June 2023.
People trained: almost 30,000 since inception.
Students: 1,000 to 3,000 per month.
Team: 12 people at the time of the interview, hiring toward 15 over the following months, remote across Nigeria, Asia, Canada and Australia, with most of the team in customer support and community.
Unit economics: average customer value ~$35; margins of about 30-40% including advertising costs, and 90%+ on pure operating margins. The company was not profitable yet.
Geography: 50%+ of revenue from emerging markets, specifically Nigeria, Kenya and Ghana.
Completion: the last cohort achieved 40%, against an annualized 2022 rate of ~32%; the founder cites 1-5% for traditional online learning platforms.

How it compares

According to 1M.chat's analysis of founder-reported cases, of 1,997 businesses with founder-reported revenue in Starter Story interviews (2015–2026), 118 sit in the Courses & education category. The sample is self-selected: these are founders who chose to be interviewed, not a random sample of all businesses.

	EntryLevel (June 2023 interview)	Courses & education category
Monthly revenue	$40K	$20.4K median
Employees	12	1.0 median
Founded by	1 founder	80% started by one founder

1M.chat's analysis places EntryLevel close to the category median on revenue. On headcount the gap is wide in absolute terms. Of the 118 businesses in the category, 26% were at $1M a year or more.

Channels are where EntryLevel looks least like its category. Paid social is its stated core acquisition channel, while the most common channels among the 87 category businesses with channel information were organic social media (61%), SEO and organic search (45%), email and newsletters (33%), and word of mouth and referrals (32%). Those two word-of-mouth figures measure different things — EntryLevel's 10-20% is a share of sales, while the 32% is a share of businesses naming the channel — so they are not directly comparable.

What a founder can take from it

Build the distribution mechanism before the full product. EntryLevel's first build was a referral waiting list, and that is what produced its early growth.

Test creatives in volume rather than audiences. The founder's own lesson is that he was not aggressive enough early, and should have been testing 50-100 creatives a month; his view now is that the ad platform's algorithm handles targeting better than manual audience splits do.

Prefer the obvious message. The winning data analyst ad named the outcome and showed the instructor's face. If a channel needs cleverness to work, treat that as a warning sign rather than a puzzle to solve.

Hire senior early, and delegate early. His argument against hiring three juniors instead of one senior is management overhead: more direct reports means more of your time spent coordinating rather than building.

Get one core product right before adding lines. He says he expanded too quickly and introduced new product lines when the core product still needed to grow significantly.

Sources

Revenue, team and start-cost figures are what the founder reported at the interview date, not current figures and not a prediction of what you will earn. Product and pricing facts come from the business's own website as checked on 30 September 2026. Method & sources · Disclosure