You don't need a marketing degree to build marketing that works

Hey, it’s Gordana from Collabwriting and I have to make a confession 👋🏼

I don’t have a marketing degree. I have a degree in literature.

My early career wasn't spent looking at funnels, but at poetry, essays, and unpublished manuscripts. I spent my days in classrooms, showing students how a single, well-placed word can change the entire direction of a story.

The shift into marketing happened almost by accident. I started sharing literary stories on TikTok, and suddenly, millions of people were watching.

That was my first real lesson: people don't want "content", they want a story they can feel.

So I followed that curiosity. 👣👣

The work before the work

I started freelancing. Managing Instagram accounts. Obsessing over copy. Learning to read data the way I used to read metaphors.

Eventually, I joined Collabwriting as the first employee, ready to see if my love for words could actually scale a business.

And honestly?

At the beginning, I felt completely out of my depth.

I was learning “marketing 101” in real time, while everyone else seemed fluent in a language I had just started to hear.

If it weren’t for Sandra and Ivan - their resources, their patience, their way of thinking out loud - I’m not sure I would have survived those first months.

But four years later, I see it differently. 😎

My background isn’t a gap in my resume. It’s the root of my entire approach.

Because analyzing a text, searching for the right word, tracking meaning across hundreds of pages, and understanding human psychology through characters…

That is marketing.

It’s research.
It’s sense-making.
It’s noticing patterns.
It’s building understanding over time.

And that’s also how I use Collabwriting.

Not as a place to “save links”. But as a place to collect thoughts, fragments, sentences, screenshots, ideas, and slowly turn them into clarity.

Into stories.
Into positioning.
Into decisions.

That’s what most teams are really missing.

Not more content. Not more tools. But a way to think with what they find.

So if you feel like an outsider in your industry because you didn’t take the “classic path”, keep going.

The world already has enough classically trained experts.

What it needs is your way of seeing. Your way of connecting things. Your way of making sense of noise.

Everything else comes later.

And I’m grateful I get to spend my days building a place where that “earlier” part actually has room to exist. 🪴

Until next time,

Gordana
and the Collabwriting Team 💛

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