My internship stint with an established startup
I believe everyone has an innate talent, a hidden ability that sets one apart from the world. I was unaware of mine and was juggling through my interests. I had gotten into a premier institute and thus began the journey of exploration. With no desires of following the sheep, I set out to build my path of success. I had exploited many different possibilities – played football, refined my chess playing skills, joined an entrepreneurship cell, and wrote numerous articles. I worked as a content developer, a digital marketer, and a business developer. This season, I wanted to do something completely different. I was aligned to working in an established startup and was fascinated by user engagement, so I searched the first-grade user engagement startups in Mumbai and reached out to the concerned persons on LinkedIn.
I emailed the product marketing manager citing my interest in working at WebEngage. He admired my interest and got connected to me over the phone. He enquired about my previous work and interests. He asked me why I should be selected to which I claimed that my varied experience in business development and working in startups made me a perfect candidate for their fast-growing startup. He asked me why I chose WebEngage. I told him that it was one of the top three user engagement startups in Mumbai and that I had applied to all three. I had turned down the offer from Wingify since the job posting was in Bangalore while I was still in touch with CleverTap. He liked my honest answer and asked me to share my published blogs, project reports, presentations I’d made, etc. Subsequently, I had a telephonic interview with him during which we discussed my work details, my interests, and what projects he wanted me to work on. I gave my inputs and finalised on some tentative projects. He was pretty impressed and offered me an internship as a product marketing executive. He sent me an official email regarding my selection. I was excited to observe how things function in an established firm.
My internship started with a fright of working in a huge office but soon I molded into the amazing work culture. My manager was extremely helpful; he cleared the slightest of my doubts and gave me a complete flexibility to work. I shared my expectations to explore varied departments and strengthen my growth curve, so he assigned me projects in marketing and sales and business development. This was a ‘Help will always be given at Hogwarts to those who ask for it’ moment. I started off with a project in marketing which included SEO analysis of the competitors, searching for their traffic sources, and making strategies to direct traffic to our website from similar sources. Then, I was assigned a project to make the flow of Salesforce, a customer relationship management software, of WebEngage simpler and efficient by taking inputs from various sales representatives and managers. I tackled the project head-on. Within a month, I understood the working of Salesforce and added several new entities like new reports to it. My next project was Channel Partnership Project which involved finding potential companies that WebEngage could partner with to expand its operations in foreign countries. I started the project from scratch, shortlisted 300 companies, and e-mailed all of them for a proposal. I set up interviews with the few companies which reverted. Unfortunately, my tenure got finished in the middle of this project so I couldn’t complete it though my work was extremely beneficial for the company.
We worked hard, played hard, and partied harder. I got firsthand experience of working in a marketing team and a sales team. WebEngage filled me with an enthusiasm to work at a level I didn’t even expect of me. The internship provided me with a wonderful opportunity to hone my existing skillset and to exploit other possible grounds to work on. I also learnt about setting up teams and building long term visions for the firm.
Author of the article: Varun Deo
