What I Learned From My Internship in San Francisco
And What You Can Learn From My Experience
Over this past semester, I was able to get a first-hand experience inside of a Series A startup and get a better understanding of what goes on in the office. The company that I interned for was named Okera. Okera sells a B2B platform that allows companies to have secure data access at scale by enabling self-service analytics to unlock the full potential of your company’s data. Put in a more digestible way. The company provides a platform to protect, organize, and access the data within a company’s data lakes. Those people who don’t know what a data lake is, don’t worry; I didn’t know what it was either. Here is an article that defines what a data lake is.
The Beginnings
As I showed up on my first day in the office, I was bombarded with all these terms that I had no clue what they mean. I shook my head yes as if I understood all of it. After the first conversations, I immediately went to my computer and looked up every one of the terms they used to understand better what I was getting myself into. After the first couple of times of going to the office, I finally understood what the company did, what the industry consisted of, and why this platform they sell was so helpful. This was the point where I could start getting to work.
During my 4 months, I focused on marketing and finding ways to improve its digital marketing campaigns, email campaigns, and overall brand image. The beginning mostly consisted of website analyses where I would look at the websites for Okera and their competitors. I would create reports analyzing nearly every aspect of these websites. In these reports, I would find things that Okera did well and things they could improve upon. By looking at the competitors, I could see what they did that worked and then look to find ways to implement those characteristics in Okera’s website. This process was long and very detail-oriented, but it made me realized how important the small details are in marketing. The CTA location (Call to Action) needs to be optimized to get people to click. The color of the background needs to flow with the color of the picture and text. This experience reminded me about all the times that in my marketing class, the professor would stress the importance of the details. My professor knew well before I did that.
“to have the best chances for success in marketing, the small details do matter.”
Email Campaigns
After all the website analyses, the next project I worked on was analyzing email campaigns. For this project, I had to dissect a group of email campaigns and determine what characteristics made them successful and which ones made them unsuccessful. During this project, I spent a lot of time in Hubspot, where I would take an in-depth look into the subject line, then from the name, then from the email address, email copy, CTAs, and email length to determine how to create the best email.
After reading many emails and spending hours on Hubspot, what I took from this experience was that the best-performing emails were those that brought value. Nobody wanted to receive spammy emails that looks like Okera was trying to sell them their product. The emails that succeeded are those that knew their customers and provided value to them. These successful emails were short and to the point. They taught the reader something which they didn’t know before and sought to share something worth reading. This completely changed how I write emails and is still changing the way I communicate daily.
As I went through this project, I was reminded of my finance teacher, who would always ask, “Who cares?”. He worked to make us realize that writing long, boring texts is something of the past. We needed to get to the point, bring value, and be done. Therefore,
“no matter what you are doing, bring value always.”
Hubspot Cleanup
The last project that I worked on was when I took the contacts within Hubspot and merged duplicate contacts of the same people. This project consisted of hours and hours of opening contacts, looking into every contact, and choosing one to be put as the primary contact. During this project, I used Hubspot and Salesforce to take an in-depth view of every contact and see which one was the best to put as the primary contact.
Many people may see this project as repetitive and boring, which it somewhat is, but instead of seeing it that way, I came to find value from this project. This project showed me that there is an actual person behind every email campaign, every website visit. Sometimes, we can get caught up in the project's daily tasks and forget that these are actual people. That being said, why are we reaching out to these actual people?
As a company, we strive to help these people. We want to make their lives easier by providing a platform that could save them time and money. All of these contacts represented not just a number in our contact list, but instead, a relationship that exists between them and us. This reminded me of my social impact class, where our teachers would explain that business is so much more than simply making money. It was about bringing a positive impact and improving the lives of the people who live on this Earth. I challenge everyone who reads this to take a moment, pause and think about the people you are serving. It is not only about the money; it is also about the people you are helping. That being said, always remember,
“business should be focused on helping people not just your bank account.”
As I wrap up my last project at my internship, I would like to thank the entire Okera team for accepting me into their company. You were very welcoming, and I appreciate all that you entrusted me with. Lastly, I would like to thank my boss and mentor, R. Paul Singh, for assisting me throughout this entire process. He was always there to help, whether for Okera or life in general. I am grateful for the relationship we have built over the past 4 months, and I look forward to the many years to come.
*Originally published on April 17, 2020
