What I got from doing two unpaid internships, and those startup internship offers are probably not abusive

I am the 49-year-old founder of RiteTag, a bootstrapped, self-funded startup. I am an American living in Japan who gets to work with 18 people in seven countries. Most of them are better educated than me and nearly all of them started with RiteTag as an unpaid intern. The rhetoric on how using people for free labor is evil is nothing new, never lacking in valid arguments, and never acknowledges the success stories. This is why I decided to share my story and provide the means for finding the evil or good in what our startup does with interns.

I did two unpaid internships, the second from age 43. Financially it was hard, but I needed to do those exact internships, and those internships did not pay.

Between my third and fourth years at Penn State, while doing my B.A. in Film, I interned at an owned-and-operated CBS Television station (e.g. owned by the network, and not poor.) While I had to pay Penn State for the three credits I earned for the internship, I drew zero salary, stipend, expenses — nothing. Commuting to and from the station five days/week, getting around Philadelphia for shoots, lunches in the WCAU TV cafeteria, all out-of-pocket. What I garnered from this, along with a video production assistantship in the next semester and a little sound recording work for an independent TV producer in Japan, right after school, was an arrival at the epiphany that TV work was not in the cards for me.

Many years later, after working for a number of Japanese manufacturers, where I developed their export markets, and then, having run two small businesses, I decided to join a startup. My skill-set was not optimal and I could not get a paying job in one. The founder of IdeasWatch gave me the opportunity I needed, as the unpaid community manager.

I am certain that the connections made while working in IdeasWatch along with the access to people would guide me on my own startup journey are what made it possible for me to recruit for and launch RiteTag. The founder of IdeasWatch, Michal, never treated me like a lackey, and to this day, I tell our interns early on that since I love working with people but hate working for them, no one has ever worked for RiteTag. I work with people / they work with us. This usually works out well.

About one year ago, after my friend Sarabjot told me that his work on RiteTag kept coming up throughout his on-site interviews, I went back and asked the interns from our very first season of offering what was surely our least organized and least beneficial internship to give us a little feedback that they would not mind us publishing. I think I reached out to thirteen people and included the stories of the first ten who replied in this article. Just scroll down past my little introduction to read their stories in their own words.

Our CTO, Michal Hudeček (founder of IdeasWatch and co-founder of several startups, expert in website monetization, and international speaker on website motivation) had been a mentor to young entrepreneurs for years before we teamed up. Michal takes our responsibility to ensure that those who give us their best work are certain to leave us in either a far more employable state or better yet, ready to launch their own startup. Some even refuse to leave.

People give us their time, and we give them ours. I write letters of recommendation myself. It is one of the biggest honors of my life to be able to see that those who complete an internship with RiteTag are fully credited for the value that they imparted upon our startup. Nothing warms the heart like learning that people who have helped propel us a little closer to becoming the world’s most powerful social media optimization SaaS company not only learned plenty while with us, but also found that

Their unpaid internship with RiteTag is what is getting them the best job they have ever had.

An easy way to look into who they are and what they do now in to simply search RiteTag in LinkedIn. Ignore the company page; we do nothing with it. Here are the people of RiteTag, past and present.

I would encourage people who acknowledge that they might need to do an internship or two before either landing a dream job or founding a startup themselves to study many startups and companies and aggressively approach those that they think might be right for them. Study them, learn about their value proposition, people, history, and hit them with questions. Search their company/startup name in LinkedIn.

How to decide if an internship is worthwhile — regardless of the compensation

How many people have been through their doors? How long have they stayed?

What did former interns go on to do after their internship ended?

Do former interns have recommendations from the startup/company they were with? Are they very brief and cursory or look redundant? This might give you a sense of the treatment you can anticipate, should you join them.

What are the problems they are solving? Will your work be part of the solutions?

Can you choose what you do with them, say, if you prove your abilities, hustle and grit?

What kind of leaders are the people with lofty titles? Would you want to be like them? Can you see them encouraging, empowering and helping you to lead or take what you do to the next level?

Are they going to be around in five years…?

Does the CEO seem to spend more time jet-setting to conferences and keynote speaking, or pandering to investors — rather than working at their startup?

Can you speak with the key staff you want to speak with before making a commitment, and if you do that, do you think you’ll like working with them?

We’re hiring, by the way.

Please do follow-up posts with your unpaid internship stories, whether with RiteTag or elsewhere. Recommends on this post are appreciated, and also, if you highlight some text that resonated with you and Tweet it, I will do something with that. — Saul