Her Blog Post Got 15 Views. One Person Built an Entire Career From It. | Jennifer van Alstyne

Cheryl Lau

Jennifer Van Alstyne posted about academics being paid for their speaking. It went viral – but not in the way she hoped. The comments were hateful. Some were racist. Fellow academics pushed back.

She kept showing up anyway.

Jennifer is the founder of The Academic Designer, where she helps professors build their online presence through website design, social media, and bio writing. But before any of that, she was 18 years old, away at college, having lost her parents and left an abusive marriage – figuring out how to make her way in the world alone.

In this conversation, we talk about what it means to build an online presence from your values rather than your metrics, why she stopped chasing views after a blog post with 15 readers changed one person’s entire career, and how she learned that real community starts with one person who wouldn’t take no for an answer.