Covid Interns — The Dublin-based job board for the world
Why we featured Covid Interns:
COVID introduced a lot of uncertainty and it was always great to hear stories of people who stepped up to try and help others. To find out that not only did the Covid Interns founders themselves graduate into a difficult job market but built a project that has now become a side-hustle business was an impressive mark of side-hustling.
Hello! What’s your background, and what are you working on?
Rob Muldowney: I finished my undergrad in May last year. I studied business studies at Trinity College London. As soon as we finished college, my close friend and I from uni started Covid interns.
How did you get the idea for Covid Interns and how did you get started?
Rob: The initial idea was to help connect people to short-term projects and internships. Now, we also offer longer-term part-time/internships, and also full-time roles.
Covid Interns started when Paddy (my cofounder) was applying for internships in our last year of university. We found a lot of them were getting pulled at the last minute during covid and we just had these anxieties about the job market and what graduates were going to be facing in the next couple of years.
We knew from chatting with friends in our undergraduate course that those anxieties were pretty prevalent. Just from talking about that, we developed the idea over the phone and we said, “Hey look let’s get started on this as soon as their exams finished”.
We gave ourselves a weekend off after exams and when we reconvened on Monday, got on a few Zoom calls and hashed out the idea. We got started by getting the perspectives of a lot of people we knew, and in business, on the value proposition that we were thinking about.
We started with short-term, flexible projects that Undergraduate and Master students could take to help SMEs with particular commercial or operational challenges they were facing in the pandemic. We wanted to make sure that that would be of interest, both to students and to businesses so we did market research and called local businesses in our areas. Once we put up a couple LinkedIn posts and that’s where we saw the real indications of interest.
In terms of how we took off, it was really through word of mouth. There had been so much doom and gloom in the media that I think people were refreshed by what we were doing, shared it around and were very forthcoming with support. I don’t know if you have been to Ireland, but it is a small place and word can travel really fast. We started getting a lot of inbound traction and people started asking us if they could write little pieces on us.
In terms of outbound, we would target heads of networks, heads of university societies, trying to establish a good inflow of candidates and jobs to offer on the platform.
What is your business model, and how have you grown your revenue?
Rob: In the Summer of 2020, we were completely non-profit. At the time, we just wanted to deliver social impact. There was a lot of opportunities, and a lot of organisations we worked with that said we should start charging money, and around the start of 2021, we pivoted to a paid model. After 3 weeks of the placement, we consider that placement successful and charge them a few hundred euros.
The quote per placement will differ accordingly to the job scope and the size and stage of the organization. For example, if you are just looking for a digital marketer for a short-term project, that is far easier for us to place. If you are looking for a full-time web development candidate and so we charge a different rate, depending on, the complexity of the headhunting recruitment service that you are asking for.
We have different quotes for different organizations, but within the range of 100–900 euros, with a money-back guarantee
How have you found balancing work and your side hustle? What’s your schedule like?
Rob: In the early mornings, I will work on Covid Interns. During work hours, I work on Let’s get Checked, my current employer. Let’s Get Checked is one of Ireland’s most successful startups, which among other things, sells COVID-19 testing solutions. I work in the sales department there so it is super busy since I clock in at 12-noon to align with the US Eastern time and work late into the evenings.
After work, I continue working on Covid Interns, so I spend roughly 5 hrs a day working on it. Obviously work comes first, but during the lockdowns, there is also nothing to do so it is a great time for a side hustle. In a post-covid work, who knows going forward, but it is a great time now.
What are the biggest challenges you have faced and the obstacles you have overcome?
Rob: The biggest challenge was the initial idea of validating Covid Interns. We did not know if it would take off as it was really our first time founding something and there was also the initial mental hump of trying to do something and try.
The other obstacle was also really around the initial days of generating reputation and trust as we were just 2 guys with an undergraduate degree, doing a lot of cold phone calls.
Now, we have a bit of trust — we have been prominently featured on the Financial Times, Irish Times and other great publications, and a good track record with a couple of hundred success placements.
The trust and reputational aspect of the company is now great, but in the beginning, the outbound cold-calling was a daunting experience though once we got into the rhythm of it, it became a lot better. Putting your neck out there was the biggest challenge we faced.
Have you found any type of resources or mentors particularly helpful or advantageous?
Rob: Trinity Business School and Trinity College were very supportive — posting on LinkedIn, Instagram where they have got tens of thousands of followers. This gave us a little traction, especially on the student side.
We worked with a few Irish entrepreneurs who gave us advice through virtual coffees on building a brand, and gave us a lot of insights especially once we decided to start charging in 2021.
A lot of our clients have also been great about helping us pivot to the 2021 version of Covid Interns, which is a monetized social enterprise as opposed to just a non-profit. It’s been cool to see our clients giving us advice and wanting us to succeed.
What’s your advice for folks who are just starting out?
Rob: Just start. If you have an idea now, there is no better idea to start up. You need time after work to do it and the pandemic is a great time to start since most people have extra time. I have found it helpful for my mental health to work on something in my spare time.
A lot of my friends will probably say that this last year has been extremely boring, but for my cofounder and I, and the rest of the team, it has been a bit of a whirlwind where we are constantly on our feet and we are really engaged with something that we find really interesting.
As long as you are enjoying it, it does not even have to be profitable. You can always find a way to make it profitable if people are demanding.
Are there 3 other side-hustle businesses we should know about?
- Stampify.com: A Trinity College startup that is a digital loyalty card app that allows partnered organizations to get loyalty stamps and helps donates meals to the underprivileged.
- Tribe Charity: A community of people who help raise money for mental health, and recently raised 100k in seed funding
- GradGuide: A CV building/mentorship platform takes cohorts of final year students and try to land them jobs at tech companies.
Is there anything that would be helpful to you now?
Rob: We are in the pandemic so we have seen remote roles have really taken off — anyone around the world, even folks not based in Europe should reach out to us for interns. We have placed people from New York to Singapore.
We can place anything under the sun, but our bread and butter are digital marketing roles, which have been the bulk of our placements. We are a social enterprise so we also do pro-bono rates for Charities — let us know!
Where can we go to learn more?
Rob: Check us out at https://covidinterns.com/
Are there any other interesting people or businesses we should feature? Hit us up!
What is Side Hustle Yield?
Side Hustle Yield is built by En Hui Ong and Chia Jeng Yang and meant to highlight the people and their creative Side Hustles business models that are generating side income — be it software, widgets, online e-commerce or offline retail business models.
