10 Lessons I Learned as a Startup Intern (Part 1)
According to Fortune, 90% of startups will fail.
Fucked up, right?
However, I worked on a startup that succeeded.
For a year, I accompanied two brilliant engineers, Pavan Boob and Ramkumar Rama Rao, as they turned their ideas into a profitable business.
There are too many genetic articles detailing the startup experience on popular business publications.
And I’m sick of them.
#SorryNotSorry
That’s why I’m giving an honest perspective on growing and marketing a startup.
I was the first remote intern at AskMeAnything.Me that later pivoted into FuelPanda.
A fuel-delivery service that was accepted into 500 Startups and was featured on TechCrunch and Business Insider.
Earning these accomplishments wasn’t easy.
It was a journey full of mistakes, small wins, and constant adjustments.
We’ve overcome a lot of challenges, and I’m going to explain how you can do the same.
I have many exciting stories to share. But, I think it’s best to start from the beginning…
1. Managing a remote team is hard AF
I’ve virtually interned for 10+ businesses, media companies, and blogs.
They’ve all had this problem: they couldn’t keep their interns.
I’ve joined group calls where managers became frustrated because we didn’t finish our work.
I’ve been CC’d in emails where fellow interns repeatedly begged for a response from a supervisor.
I’ll be honest. I was just another flaky intern. I made a lot of false promises to people.
I didn’t overcome my bad habits until I worked with Pavan.
I believed in his vision
On Internships, I was regularly approached by recruiters and business owners to work on their projects.
Usually, I would decline. Either because the job was boring, or they wanted free work.
But, AskMeAnything.Me was different.
Pavan messaged my inbox. He asked me to read his job posting.
On the posting, he described AskMeAnything.Me as an innovative online platform connecting everyday people to industry influencers with Q&A’s.
He bragged how Guy Kawasaki gave it a shout out on Twitter:
I was like, “Oh shit! I know that guy.”
At the time, I was reading a lot about startups and online marketing. So this info peaked my interest.
The posting also promised that I would get real-life training on how to build and market a product.
That’s what I wanted. A challenge and guidance.
Here is the follow-up email that I sent to Pavan:
We scheduled our first call. On it, we bonded over our love for growth-hacking and the startup culture.
When we finally discussed the product, Pavan explained his vision.
He wanted to 10x his product.
I was like, “Oh, really?”
He wanted to grow his online product into a powerful media company.
It would be the ultimate content hub for ambitious people to learn from famous and talented minds.
I believed him. How couldn’t I?
I liked his laid-back yet energetic attitude. We had similar interests and aspirations.
And his product was already public. He hosted Q&A’s with TINT founders Nikhil Aitharaju and Tim Sae Koo.
And he hosted a live Q&A with the founding engineer of Pinterest, Yash Nelapati.
I truly believed that I could help grow his online platform into a super startup.
I felt like I was going to be part of something great.
So, I ignored all of my other internship offers, postponed my personal goals, and spent the next few months focused on growing AskMeAnything.Me.
Most people aren’t going to join your startup as fast as I did.
You need to persuade them with your vision.
A vision is how you see your startup’s future.
Look at this triangle diagram:
The vision is used to inspire goals that will guide your business’s direction.
When you set goals, you’ll create a strategy or action plan consisting of tactics and activities that will make your vision a reality.
Look at this example for building the best time tracking tool:
When you identified your vision, look for talent that has already shown interest in your startup’s topic.
On my Internship resume, I had experience working as an editorial and marketing intern. I use to blog about online marketing.
So when Pavan saw my profile, he knew he had to hire me.
If potential interns and employees don’t have a passion for your specific startup, they should at least have a desire to learn more about it.
When people are naturally attracted to your ideas, they are more likely to help you succeed.
I was offered incentives
You’ve probably thought, “these entitled millennials don’t understand hard work.”
Well, you’re right. We ain’t shit!
But don’t expect us to prioritize work that isn’t giving us value.
Nobody wants to work for free. Employees and interns want to be rewarded for their efforts.
Pavan gave me a few intrinsic and extrinsic incentives:
- $250 every month (better than being unpaid)
- Real-world marketing training
- Access to behind-the-scenes analytics
- Fair and equal treatment
He assured me that my opinions and efforts would influence the success of his startup.
I wouldn’t be another intern in charge of a Facebook page.
The International Society for Performance Improvement and The Incentive Research Foundation found that incentives increased individual performance by 27% and team performance by 45%.
If you want to attract and retain good talent, you need to offer them a reason to stay loyal.
Pavan became my accountability partner
Early into the internship, we encountered a problem.
We lived in different time zones. I was in Eastern while Pavan was in Pacific. That’s a three-hour difference.
Most employers would’ve dropped me. But Pavan didn’t give a fuck.
He asked for my daily schedule so we could plan Skype meetings around it.
We decided to chat every other day at 6 PM EST. or 3 PM PST. Here’s a screenshot of an invite from my Google Calendar:
Before every meeting, he sent an email or text message confirming if we could both attend the chat.
At first, I thought these check-ins were annoying. But they quickly became a habit.
Pavan did something that most supervisors failed to do. He held me accountable.
It’s foolish to expect your remote team to commit to a project at the beginning.
Unlike an in-house workplace, there aren’t social and environmental factors reminding people to show up to work.
Groove HQ and Zapier listed the challenges of managing a remote team:
- Too many home and online distractions
- Communication is much harder
- Video and phone call issues
- Lack of company culture or social cohesion
- Time-management is harder to manage
These factors are why employee and employer ghosting is so common.
I’ve joined amazing online training sessions with business owners, only to never hear from them again.
That’s why, YOU, the startup founder, have to take the initiative.
You have to be your team’s loud-ass rooster notifying them of a video call at 7 PM every Tuesday and Thursday.
You need to be the ultimate accountability leader.
The American Society of Training and Development reported that the probability of accomplishing a goal increases by 95% if you have accountability appointments with another person.
That’s a big increase, right?!
Remember, it’s your startup. Take the leadership role by scheduling bi-weekly accountability sessions with your team.
We used Trello to complete tasks
In every Skype call, we discussed the tasks we accomplished in Trello. Our boards were inspired by the Kanban method.
A Kanban board allows you to visualize the workflow of your project.
We divided our board into four lists or stages:
- Backlog — a lineup of assigned unfinished tasks
- Doing — tasks I was trying to complete
- Review — tasks waiting for Pavan’s approval
- Done — tasks that were finished or published
Each list had cards representing a task. If a task was complicated, we added a checklist to it.
Whenever a task was updated, we moved the card to the next stage of the workflow.
This system helped us monitor our projects.
And, it boosted my productivity.
Because Pavan added new tasks to the Backlog every day, I didn’t have to think hard about my next steps.
As I moved a card across the board, my body released endorphins.
Endorphins are natural “feel-good” chemicals.
Moving a card was as satisfying as crossing a task off a to-do list. I felt more motivated to finish goals.
2. Break Down Your SMART Goals
You must set goals for your startup.
But, they shouldn’t be vague.
Phrases like, “I want to be the next unicorn” or “I want Jason Calacanis to be my angel investor and adoptive father,” are not goals.
They’re aspirations.
Napolean Hill famously said:
“Goals are dreams with deadlines.”
Turn your dream into a reality with SMART goals.
These goals are:
- Specific — explains what you want to achieve
- Measurable — has a metric that can be tracked to signify progress
- Action-Oriented — has action steps you can try
- Realistic — is relevant to your overall vision
- Timely — has a deadline
Here are examples of SMART goals:
- To become the #1 rising app in our niche, we need to gain 100,000 downloads in 12 months.
- To secure 2 clients every month, I need to promote my email list with Facebook Ads.
- To generate more qualified leads, we must increase our web traffic by 20% in 3 months.
- To acquire 5,000 new users by May 1st, I’ll experiment with social media and community marketing.
- To grow my personal brand, I’ll attempt to write for an industry publication every month.
If you fulfill a major goal, then Jason might consider adopting you.
We practiced a sales management hack
At AskMeAnything, we focused primarily on user acquisition.
Our goal was to gain 5,000 users in 5 months.
As a new startup, this goal was ambitious (and kinda unrealistic). But, Pavan was confident that we could achieve it.
To me, 5,000 people seemed like a lot.
But talented and experienced salespeople deal with much bigger numbers every day.
They develop formulas to divide large annual sales goals into quarterly, monthly, weekly, and daily targets.
Here are the formulas we used to simplify our user goal:
Major user target / # of months = # of needed users every month
5,000 / 5 = 1,000 users a month
# of users every month / 4 weeks = # of users every week
1,000 / 4 = 250 users every week
# of users every week / 7 days = # of users every day
250 / 7 = 35 users every day
(If I’m wrong, please tell me in the comments. I hate math so much.)
Our priority was to gain 35 new users every day.
By dividing our large goal into smaller targets, we were motivated to improve our performance.
Art Markman explained in the Harvard Business Review, that by tackling smaller projects you’re shortening the learning/feedback loop.
By reflecting and learning from experiences quicker, you’ll finish similar tasks faster and be more likely to handle complex tasks.
Therefore, achieving your ultimate goal quicker and better.
I regret not practicing the 80/20 rule
Did we get 35 users right away?
NOPE!
Gaining traction was hard as fuck!
We experimented with a variety of marketing strategies. Trying to find what worked.
Pavan coded an algorithm to track new users. And he used Mixpanel to track user conversions and activity.
Online communities like Reddit and Hacker News had the most conversions.
I would post links in subreddits like Entrepreneur and Startups to get new users.
Many people wanted to learn from successful venture capitalists and serial-entrepreneurs.
Here are screenshots of my archived posts:
The second best-converting channel was social media. I shared our Q&A’s in Facebook groups and Twitter.
Billionaire Ben Horowitz even liked one of our tweets.
I also practiced influencer outreach, blogging, forum commenting, and Pinterest marketing.
But none of them were as useful as Hacker News and Reddit.
They were the 20% effort giving us 80% of the results.
If I could go back in time, I would focus more on these channels.
Too many marketers believe that they should have a presence on all platforms.
They’re wrong.
In actuality, they’re spreading themselves too thin. As WordStream’s Larry Kim said:
Multi-tasking is a myth!
Every time you switch between tasks or platforms, you’re losing time and effort on each.
It’s better to be an expert on one channel than a generalist on all of them.
3. Everything needs to be in spreadsheets
Pavan was a real stickler for spreadsheets.
He wanted to record everything. From names, email addresses, websites, to notes, and email responses. EVERYTHING!
This is because he believed in growth hacking.
Traction author, Sean Ellis explained it as, “running smart experiments to drive growth within your business.”
To determine if our marketing efforts hacked growth, we would have to treat it like a science project.
Here’s the usual growth hacking cycle:
There’s a step missing after analyze called documentation.
To accurately measure the effectiveness of our experiments, we had to note our metrics and conversions.
Just like this sheet:
You should track your online audience reach
Recording growth-hacking experiments are important. But so should tracking your online audience.
As the internet becomes more accessible and e-commerce businesses replace retail stores, you’ll realize that most of your users and clients will come from the internet.
Web developer Charlotte O’ Hara uses spreadsheets to track how her online audience help generate revenue.
Every month, she records her website traffic.
She also records her social media followers.
She uses a chart to breaks down her audience reach by a platform.
And, she also tracks email list growth.
These tables and graph are very helpful for startups that are trying to increase online brand awareness and audience reach within their niche.
The bigger your audience, the more likely you’ll convert them.
You should create a proactive dashboard
Charlotte’s spreadsheets are awesome. I highly recommend any online startup or business to use them.
But at AskMeAnything.Me, we created a proactive dashboard.
Oh his YouTube channel, Noah Kagen described it as a spreadsheet outlining your goals and marketing habits.
Noah’s goal is to get 100,000 podcast downloads this year.
So, he tracked how many downloads he needed every month:
The second half of the Master Podcast Tab illustrates how his marketing efforts help gain new listeners.
On another tab, he outlined his team’s controlled marketing behaviors.
To get more downloads, Noah needs to grow his email list and appear on other podcasts.
So he sends guest podcast pitches.
He can’t control the outcome of his guest pitches. But by sending more emails, he’s increases his chances of being booked.
If he emails 5 people a week, he will secure 2 guest spots.
This dashboard relies on him and his team completing specific habits to achieve his ultimate podcast goal.
You should create a similar dashboard for your startup.You’ll be forced to take action and adapt to changes.
Wait! There’s more…
I know that I promised to share 10 lessons.
But, I only provided 3.
That's because every lesson is so valuable that I spend extra time expanding it.
Please sign up to my email list to get notified when Part 2 is released.
In Part 2, I’ll explain how FuelPanda was born, my reaction, and how we struggled to find our product/market fit.
