A Day in the Life of Agora
By Katherine Bienkowski, Marketing Manager at Agora
No day is the same when you work at a place like Agora — an idea platform for people to have conversations that matter, with people who matter.
Constant changes, adrenaline, and product sprints are the norm when you work in an early stage startup. And I must say I love it.
Therefore, it’s hard to tell you what exactly a day in the life of an Agora intern will bring you. Rather, I will tell you what some of these days have brought me.
Waking up for your job in the morning is surprisingly easy if you love what you do (and if your workday starts at 10 instead of 9). Each morning we hit the ground running; the growth team presents the previous day’s marketing data. These numbers vary from paid ad campaigns to organic marketing and outreach. We use Google Analytics and other platforms to determine if people express interest in our product from landing page interactions to click through rates on advertisements.
We oftentimes go outside and talk to anyone and everyone. While building your own product you develop a bias because you work with it every day. It is important that a random person can take a look and gather a basic understanding.
To combat our bias we find people outside, ask them to use our software, and observe how they use it- are they confused with the navigation? Do they know how to create an idea? In what context would they use our idea collaboration platform? It may sound odd but we find imperative points of data from complete strangers.
Debriefs follow these feedback sessions. We come together and draw inferences on what we just learned. Debriefs can lead to us building a new feature or just making minor tweaks in the UI. Either way, we learn more about user personas and use cases.
By now we are pretty hungry! Fortunately our Founder and CEO Elsa is as keen on food as the rest of the team is. Tatte is a team favorite. Za is another restaurant we love which has surprisingly good Mac n’ Cheese pizza, believe it or not.
After being recharged with lunch, we get back to collaborating. From branding to product, we love team brainstorms. Something I have found is that sticky notes add creativity to any situation. We collaborate, debate about new features, and come to a consensus on what we do next.
As Growth Marketing Manager, I spend a lot of my time getting people to use our product and analyze how they do so. We look into where we can advertise organically online and gather a solid user base that provides us with meaningful data.
The purpose of Agora is to help people in the realm of team collaboration and ideation. What I love about my job the most is working with other businesses to see how we can help them make things happen that they didn’t even think were possible. Conducting research on communication barriers in businesses provides us with useful information to make ideas happen.
After a day of hard work, our team likes to do excursions. From kayaking on the Charles to clam bakes, we have a great time together.
Working at Agora has made me think out of the box and on my feet. Being a millennial doesn’t mean you should sit back and do what is assigned. Agora has gotten me to take initiative, work collaboratively with a team, and feel limitless when it comes to what I can do-even if I’m just an intern.
Interested in what we do? Visit beta.theagora.co to find out more or shoot an email to hello@theagora.co. We’re always hiring.
This story was adapted from Katherine’s guest post that originally appeared on TechGen.
