Strategy
How Jenny Stojkovic Turned a Viral AI Moment Into a 10,000-Person Creator Campaign
When a Reese Witherspoon video surfaced in late April, urging women to close their AI adoption gap, the comment section filled with apprehension. Jenny Stojkovic saw an opportunity. Within 48 hours, she and four other creators were drafting plans in direct messages. Within one week, “The Women’s AI Challenge” was live.
The challenge, which runs through May 31, offers 10-minute daily AI lessons from five women creators across four themed weeks covering professional skills, financial literacy, career development, and content creation. It costs participants nothing. Enrollment has surpassed 10,000 women, according to Jenny, who projects the total will climb before the end of the month.
Jenny is a venture capitalist and General Partner at Joyful VC, a $23-million early-stage climate and food technology fund, and the former Executive Director of sf.citi, the San Francisco-based technology policy organization where she represented Google, Meta, Microsoft, and more than 40 other companies in government affairs under investor Ron Conway. She is also the author of the “Billion Dollar Energy” newsletter and the founder of The Women Creators, a Los Angeles-based media organization launched in March 2026 with a focus on connecting women with AI and content creation.
“The two things that are changing most are AI adoption and content creation,” Jenny says. “I wanted to make sure that women are helping to lead at the forefront of what’s changing in the economy.”
From Viral Moment to Live Campaign: A 48-Hour Window
“The Women’s AI Challenge” was not planned months in advance. The proximate cause was the Witherspoon video, which highlighted data showing women use AI at 25% lower rates than men and that the jobs women hold are three times more likely to be automated, according to campaign materials published by The Women Creators.
“It was a pretty jarring video because not only was she sharing her perspective of why women are falling behind, but the comments were very interesting, to say the least,” Jenny says. “There’s a lot of apprehension.”
Rather than post commentary, Jenny, Aria Kim, Aditi Mishra, Shira Lazar, and Sabrina Ramonov, a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree who sold an AI startup for more than $10 million and has taught AI to more than one million followers, began discussing in direct messages. The group decided to build.
The entire campaign, including sponsor relationships, legal structure, prize logistics, website, and daily content, was assembled and funded within a single week. “Claude was our best friend, helping us draft a lot of what was going on,” Jenny notes, referring to the AI assistant the team used throughout the buildout. “A combination of AI and having a good team is really what made it come to fruition.”
Jenny cites the speed as a deliberate choice rather than a constraint. This is the third media brand she has built, and she has a clear framework for responding to cultural moments.
“The most important thing when these types of cultural moments occur is you need to be able to move quickly and decisively and to know the difference between a passing trend and an actual societal moment,” she says. “If the trending topic aligns with the brand and the brand ethos, you act on it.”
Building Free: The MVP Model Behind the Campaign
A core decision the team made early: the challenge would be free for participants. Accessing that outcome required landing sponsors before launch.
“One of the most important things in our conversation was finding brands to support the infrastructure and the costs associated with it,” Jenny says. Sponsors, including Manus AI, Stan Store, Airtable, Blotato, and Anything, fund the prize structure, which totals $5,000 in value: $3,000 in cash distributed across weekly and grand-prize winners, plus four 30-minute one-on-one coaching calls with the weekly hosts.
Rather than waiting for the campaign to be fully monetized, the team chose an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) approach. “We all decided that this would be about establishing an MVP so we’d have a proof of concept that the challenge works,” Jenny explains, “knowing full well that this would not be nearly as monetized as it could be if it were planned out a little bit longer.”
She notes that interest from brands wanting larger, single-sponsor campaigns has already emerged from the launch. A future version might involve one company rather than several sponsors sharing infrastructure costs.
On the operational side, the campaign used existing tools rather than building new ones. Jenny currently runs three newsletters on beehiiv, and the challenge’s daily email infrastructure was built on that foundation. Automatic direct message flows ran through Stan, which she already used across her creator platforms. The creators used Notion for project management and WhatsApp for internal coordination.
What the Dashboard Actually Shows
The campaign’s email performance is running well above standard benchmarks, according to Jenny’s own comparison. Based on the figures Jenny shares, the challenge emails are producing a 47% open rate and a 14.8% click-through rate. Her typical newsletter click-through rate is between 4 and 5%.
“They’re clicking through to further content, which I think is a clear indication” of genuine interest in AI, she says.
Each of the five creators owned a distinct function. Aditi Mishra, a tech executive and creator, brought a video editing team. Jenny managed the newsletter infrastructure. Others directed the website, content production, and outreach. “Each of us kind of agreed to oversee one of the different ways that we could use our talents and then trusted in everybody’s expertise,” she explains.
Coordination across three major time zones, with creators based in the UK, on the East Coast, and on the West Coast of the United States, was the most notable logistical friction.
The WhatsApp Group That Changed the Campaign
The most unexpected outcome of the launch was not a metric Jenny had anticipated tracking. A WhatsApp group created for participant communication grew to more than 600 members within three days of the challenge opening.
“The WhatsApp I didn’t expect,” Jenny says. “We weren’t planning to launch a WhatsApp, but we were getting a lot of emails, and we wanted a way to communicate with the participants.”
The group produced immediate, actionable feedback. Jenny had designed the financial literacy week around American-focused prompts. The WhatsApp revealed that a large portion of participants were international. “I quickly learned we had a ton of international participants,” she says, “so I started actually changing some of the daily lessons and prompts to include global applicability based on the WhatsApp feedback.” She used AI to rewrite the prompts at speed.
Jenny is deliberate about the choice not to automate the WhatsApp management with AI agents. “I actually don’t believe that an agent is able to sufficiently not just screen, but also ensure the sentiment of the comments stays positive,” she says. “WhatsApp is extremely personal. It’s people’s personal phone numbers.”
She argues that community management on platforms this direct requires human oversight that agents cannot replicate.
Where Brands Keep Getting AI Adoption Wrong
On the question of what brands and platforms most consistently miss, Jenny doesn’t hesitate. “They are not creating thoughtful approaches towards people that are apprehensive of AI in the way that they explain the content,” she says.
Privacy and safety concerns are, in her view, the most common driver of that apprehension, and most educational efforts are not designed with those concerns as the starting point. The challenge’s week-by-week structure, moving from professional to financial to career to content creation applications, was built to address that anxiety incrementally rather than assuming confidence from the outset.
The Infrastructure Question Every Creator Should Answer First
The infrastructure answer, in Jenny’s view, comes down to one word: “Emails.”
“You need to have a good structure for collecting, managing, and harnessing an email community,” she elaborates. “Most creators don’t focus on their email strategy. And I think that’s the biggest mistake.”
Her operating thesis frames the full communications stack for campaigns like this one: social media alone is insufficient.
“Having consistent and thorough communication channels is the most important thing,” Jenny says. “It’s not enough just to have a social media strategy. You need to have a newsletter strategy and, as we’ve learned, a WhatsApp strategy as well, because people have a lot of questions and it’s a lot of content, and people also want to connect with others as they’re learning.”
The Women Creators is also preparing its debut live event, focused on women in AI, to be announced in the coming weeks. A future campaign with a single large brand is under discussion, according to Jenny.
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