Powerhouse Co-Founders of UniScoops Shaping the Future of Campus News

University—the next chapter in your educational prowess. 

Full of excitement, challenges, and possibilities, transitioning from high school to academia can be a daunting and challenging experience for many students. 

The academic landscape is often characterized by specialized disciplines, rigorous methodologies, and dense terminologies that can seem unapproachable. 

Moreover, with the high volume of scholarly articles and research published daily, staying updated and finding reliable, pertinent information can be time-consuming. These complexities highlight the importance of platforms that can simplify and democratize access to academic knowledge. 

Step in, Holly and Gabriel, spearheading the charge with UniScoops!

UniScoops aims to bridge the gap between intellectual discourse and everyday understanding.

The Genesis of UniScoops

UniScoops is a unique newsletter that aims to make academia more approachable, fun, and digestible for everyone. Founded by Holly Cobb and Gabriel Pang, two passionate advocates for higher education, UniScoops aims to spark critical thinking and inspire its readers. 

Passionate about charity, social policy, and education, Holly Cobb is a third-year undergraduate at the University of Oxford, studying French and Linguistics. Gabriel Pang is a third-year undergraduate at the University of Oxford, studying Philosophy and French, and is passionate about leveling the playing field of education and making universities accessible to everyone, regardless of their background or identity.

During a late-night FaceTime, Gabriel and Holly realized their shared passion for simplifying academic knowledge and making it available to a larger audience. This led to the creation of UniScoops, a platform that delivers regular university-level “scoops” to your inbox, catering to students, educators, and anyone interested in academia.

We had a chance to speak with Holly and Gabriel about their journey and the growth of UniScoops through email newsletters.

Holly said the focus of UniScoops “is to break down these barriers and provide students, particularly state school students who may not necessarily have as much input when applying to competitive universities [with tools and an introduction to critical thinking]”.

Why beehiiv?

Creating and providing captivating and educational content is one part of the equation for email newsletters. The other is finding the right platform to distribute the content to your target audience.

Gabriel and Holly sought a platform to simplify their content-crafting process. Since neither of them had any experience in coding or technology, they required a straightforward and easy-to-manage platform that would enable them to create and publish their content effortlessly.

“Finding beehiiv was a bit of a fluke. A very lucky fluke because we knew right away beehiiv was definitely the best platform for us,” stated Gabriel.

They started their research by paying attention to what their favorite newsletters and content creators were doing. “I was reading the Ziplaw newsletter, and they used beehiiv to distribute. I loved how they formatted their newsletter. I loved the aesthetic of it and the website,” continued Gabriel.

After seeing the “hive” icon at the end of the email, it was fate! 🐝

Gabriel and Holly clicked the icon that directed them to the beehiiv website. After going through the website's tabs and learning more about beehiiv's unique features, they were impressed by what they saw. The user-friendly interface and innovative tools convinced them that beehiiv was the perfect platform to bring their project to life. It was official, UniScoops would be launched with beehiiv.

When creating a product or starting a business, you have a strategic plan that typically incorporates a forecast of finances. Since students and volunteers solely run the newsletter, UniScoops didn’t have the finances to invest in expensive tools and platforms. 

“beehiiv was willing to work with us to help us get on our feet. Their customer service rep was responsive and quickly offered us a solution that helped us have better breathing space.”

The transparency, fast response rate, and willingness to work with students were the deciding factors for Gabriel and Holly to choose beehiiv as their go-to platform.

Growing on beehiiv

UniScoops is a new player in the email newsletter industry, unlike some of the other creators on beehiiv. Holly and Gabriel needed a platform to handle design, segmenting, scheduling, and emailing to their target audience.

Since choosing beehiiv in July, UniScoops has an active subscriber list of 388.

So, how did UniScoops build a subscriber list so quickly?

The Power of Strategic Planning

Gabriel mentioned, “We got many subscribers even before we launched a single issue of what we were doing.”

Holly and Gabriel had to do a lot of research on who their target audience was (mainly 16-18-year-old students), “In our case, in the UK system, students mainly applying to university who were keen and motivated, even those who had a gap in terms of knowledge or confidence,” said Holly.

Additionally, having a budget was ideal for a newsletter run by students and volunteers. Holly and Gabriel didn't have the funds to dedicate to advertising, so getting creative was necessary.

Much of the credit goes to Gabriel, who took charge of the social media platforms, creating LinkedIn and Instagram accounts for UniScoops. Using captivating images and captions on social media helped drive interest in their newsletter.

Additionally, the power of forums and niche-specific sites helped with the momentum of collecting subscribers. “We shared it in a few different forums. We also shared it in teachers' forums, anything and everything we could think of. We shared it on a platform called Zero Gravity, which I think was probably one of the things that boosted our subscribers.”

Zero Gravity

Zero Gravity is a dynamic and innovative platform designed to empower students and help them realize their educational and career ambitions. It offers a holistic approach to academic growth and professional development, providing students with the resources to excel at school, gain admission into top universities, and secure world-class careers. 

This robust platform offers personalized career opportunities, mentorship programs, and a vibrant community of like-minded individuals to learn from and connect with. 

“Zero Gravity is a mentoring platform for disadvantaged students in the UK applying to more competitive universities,” explained Holly.

From its exclusive 'Access All Areas' feature to its comprehensive mentorship program, Zero Gravity transforms how students navigate their academic journeys and enter the professional world. 

To generate buzz and attract subscribers, UniScoops utilized the Zero Gravity forum to reach out to students and promote their newsletter. This approach proved to be successful as they were able to garner over 100 subscribers even before launching their first newsletter.

UniScoops Innovative Newsletter Template

Email newsletters can be a powerful tool for businesses and marketers, but only if they consistently provide value to subscribers. This means creating high-quality content that resonates with your audience and offers insights into topics they are interested in or solutions to their problems.

To make your newsletter stand out from the crowd, it's essential to have a well-designed layout that is visually appealing and consistent with your brand. White space is vital to creating a clean and uncluttered look, and you should use high-quality images and a balanced mix of text and visuals to create a professional feel.

Remember, your goal is to engage and inform your subscribers, so make sure your content is relevant and exciting, and always keep their needs and interests in mind.

Holly mentioned, “We recently had one article on ‘Do You Need Eyes to See?’ We broke it down in a very accessible way with GIFs, memes, and jokes. Since then, we have structured our newsletters the same each time, just changing the bullets and follow-up questions. This structure helps bridge the gap between school and higher education without seeming overwhelming.”

As mentioned, UniScoops is built on four “scoops,” or articles, to create the newsletter. Holly continued, “We decide which four scoops will be in the newsletter every week. We try to maintain a balance between all the subjects. 

We currently have volunteers who bulk-write scoops over the summer, so when the term restarts, people will inevitably get busier; many of our writers are in their final year. We plan to build a backlog over the summer.”

UniScoops Mastering Management of 18

When you start a project, keeping organized is critical. Project management is a systematic approach to guide a team in accomplishing project goals within specified constraints. It involves planning, organizing, and managing resources to complete a task, event, or duty successfully.

Several tools, such as Asana, Monday, and Notion can aid in effective project management. In the early days of UniScoops, all the work was done on iPhones using Apple Notes. The notes were shared among all the creative team members and contained a mix of screenshots, ideas, random newsletters, statistics, and graphics. 

This process turned out to be highly disorganized, prompting the team to use Notion pages. This decision allowed UniScoops to organize their work better and keep all team members accountable.

“We do a lot of our planning and organizing in Notion, and it is so easy to just format it, copy it across to beehiiv, which formats everything,” added Gabriel. “We have tags in our Notion for subjects including Chemistry, Biology, Math, and Philosophy.

As we know, keeping a newsletter going requires a lot of content. “We grew from just me and Holly writing scoops till we had two, three, five, ten, and now we have eighteen different contributors writing for maybe an hour a week on different subjects. We have a diverse team of writers, without which we couldn’t do any of this. Once the content is added to beehiiv, it gets proofread and edited. We have everything done in beehiiv, then send it off.”

Why Listen to Me? I’ve built several newsletters from the ground up over the years. My latest publication is The Level Ups business newsletter. I also run support at the fastest-growing newsletter platform, beehiiv.

Profitable Side of University Scoops

Monetizing a newsletter means generating revenue from the content you create and distribute. There are many ways to monetize a newsletter. We asked the co-founders about their plans for UniScoops and if monetization is on the horizon.

Gabriel and Holly shared, “Monetization is important but not at the forefront of our actions. This isn’t one of the big goals for UniScoops. We want to be self-sustaining because even though we are run by volunteers, we have end goals. We want to earn enough money to continue using our platform.”

Part of the appeal of beehiiv was their referral program. That would be a great way to monetize our newsletter in the future. Down the road, it would be great to pay our writers or at least compensate them somehow,” Continued Gabriel and Holly.

Favorite Features of the Hive

beehiiv is a comprehensive platform that offers user-friendly segmentation tools, customizable templates, a professional website, streamlined campaign analytics, and much more! 

With beehiiv, you can set up a professional email newsletter in just a few clicks. Additionally, beehiiv provides tools to help you grow and scale your audience.

We asked our co-founding duo what some of their favorite features are in the hive, and both agreed the design lab feature is top-notch. 

“I don’t need to write a single line of code to pick nice colors, a nice theme for my website, having my logo…This all seems alien to me, and I like being able to go back and format something without all these tech-savvy things I don’t know about,” pipped Gabriel.

“I’m nerdy, and I enjoy looking at all the analytics of each newsletter,” added Holly. beehiiv’s analytics are very insightful and full of charts and graphs. By keeping track of which links subscribers clicked, the co-founders gain valuable insights into the interests of their readership. This data helps them understand popular topics among their subscribers and tailor their content accordingly.

“Additionally, the one-click audience polls were so helpful and amazing,” added Gabriel. The polls came with comments, which helped Gabriel and Holly gauge their newsletters and how they are doing. “We had a lot of positive feedback. People liked the content. We would have never been able to get that from our audience without the one-click polls.”