My 2023 Review: How OfferLand Grew from Content into a Startup

Updated 2026/10/16

2023 is over, so I’m writing down what this year of running a personal brand and a startup was like. A quick introduction: I’m Jason. After I was admitted to Columbia’s Deferred MBA in 2022, I started my personal brand, Jason Career, to share what I know about careers and studying abroad, and I founded OfferLand to make application information less lopsided.

Why I Didn’t Become a Study-Abroad Consultant

Once I started posting content in 2022, friends and younger students kept telling me, “You should be a full-time admissions consultant.”

I did think about it…

Then I remembered my own bad experience with an application agency, and how much the industry charges. 40,000 to apply to one school? Most people apply to 4 to 6 schools, so that’s 100,000 just for that? MBA consulting fees above 300,000?!

That didn’t sit right with me at all.

It felt like only people willing to pay that much could get expert knowledge and service. (And in most cases the service wasn’t even expert or reliable.)

I understand why the market works this way, but it still seemed unfair to me…

How OfferLand Started

And then it hit me!

I could combine what I know about studying abroad and careers with my earlier experience in startups and product management, and build a product, an online platform, that fixes the pain points of applying to schools abroad. That’s how the OfferLand journey began.

With my two cofounders, we set out to build a platform, a community and tools that give students the resources and help they need. A lot of problems bothered me when I was applying, and I got hooked on finding ways to solve them. So when we built OfferLand, we designed a solution for each one:

How do I know which schools are within reach, and how should I pick them?

→ I built OfferLand’s admission results search and reporting system, so when you’re choosing schools and judging your chances, you can look at data from past applicants: their backgrounds and where they were admitted or rejected.

How do I figure out which schools and programs to apply to?

→ I hosted 10+ free online talks covering business, STEM, humanities and art schools, and uploaded them to YouTube so people could hear first-hand experiences from many different fields.

Where do I find first-hand, up-to-date information?

→ Inspired by Tyra Project, a mentorship program for PhD applicants, I used my channel to run two rounds of a Free Mentorship Program. Together with more than a dozen alumni mentors, we shared current insights on studying abroad and career information, and helped younger students work out their strengths and what they actually needed. We’re also planning a Mentor Matching feature on OfferLand so more people can find the right alumni to talk to whenever they need it.

OfferLand’s Long-Term Goal

Since starting OfferLand, my mission has become clearer: build a bridge, and grow OfferLand into a site that lasts ten years, a community, platform and set of tools that actually help international students. Whenever someone has a question, they should be able to find the right person to ask.

2022-2023, From Rejection to Acceptance: Selected by NTU Garage and Taiwan Startup Hub

The idea for OfferLand started to sprout 🌱 in mid-2022. After a brilliant engineer joined the team, we applied to the NTU Garage startup incubator at the end of the year. We made it to the second round but weren’t selected. In 2023 we started over. We rethought the product’s value proposition and the pain points we wanted to solve, and interviewed more than 100 users. That taught us much more about the problems people in this niche market face and gave us a clearer sense of where the product should go.

I watched a lot of Y Combinator videos and slowly rebuilt my basic understanding of each part of building a startup and how to put it into practice. I learned a ton about User Interviews, Growth Metrics and Business Models in particular, and it made our Pivot direction much clearer.

On the numbers side: after offerland.cc launched in August 2023, we built up more than 4,600 registered users and over 1,700 admission results (in Chinese) in six months. After launch we ran into problems like low User Retention and a confusing UI/UX. All three co-founders are still doing this part-time, but we keep iterating quickly and running User Interviews, and we plan to launch Mentor Matching to improve the experience and offer a one-stop solution.

In the end, with a clearer and more complete plan and execution we could back up with data, we became the first team accepted into NTU Garage’s 2024 cohort, and we were also selected by Taiwan Startup Hub. It’s only a small milestone, but we’ll make full use of the resources to complete the Pivot and grow. I hope we can prove Product-Market Fit (every founder’s dream 🤣).

How I Split My Time Between a Full-Time Job, Content and a Startup

If you follow my Instagram, you know I often go quiet for a while 🤣 Usually it’s because I’m busy with application consultations or deep in iterating on the OfferLand site, trying to ship new features fast enough to help users with their applications.

Besides the content and the startup, I also have a full-time job. Basically I’m working from the moment I wake up until right before I go to sleep.

So why am I so into this?

In short, I’ve found that I care a lot about impact. Whether it’s content or a startup, I want my own effort to help more people. My happiest moments are usually when someone tells me how my content or OfferLand helped them.

The way I handle several “full-time jobs” at once is to focus on one thing for a stretch of time. On top of my day job and the startup, I spend 3 straight months on a single thing: three months learning cloud computing, three months on English interviews and my resume, three months learning about startups, and so on. This feels more comfortable to me and lets me grow fast in one area. It also makes my progress easy to notice, which makes me want to put in more time, so it becomes a positive loop.

Plans for the Future

I’ve said on my podcast that if you’re a creator and want to keep producing good content, you have to keep taking in new input. Good output depends on learning, so learning is something I have to keep investing in. In 2023 I ran 10+ online and in-person talks, met a lot of lovely people, and gained many new connections and opportunities through my content. Whether it’s the content or the startup, I hope to keep growing together with everyone in this community!