“I am doing some scheduling and when are you leaving again?”
“July 27th.”
“Oh wow that’s soon! We have tons to do before than!”
“Sure! I am excited about it!”
I didn’t realize how time has flied until I had this conversation with my boss today and we couldn’t believe I only have one month left in San Francisco. Everything seems like just started. My boss is trying to figure out her optimal targets and expend her business, and I am doing everything I can to help her. Working in a startup company is an experience that I will never forget and will never regret.
At first I was assigned some tasks like building contact lists of targeted people, so that my boss can send them campaign emails. It is not some very professional work, so I was disappointed. Later on when I learned more about what her business and what her goal is, we started to think about how to do branding for the company, what kind of people that have higher needs and we should target to, and what are the things that our competitors are doing to gain the customers. Although I am just doing different kinds of research online for her all the time, I feel more and more involved. And I am learning everyday by practicing, and also by seeing and listening how my boss and how other people work with her. We don’t have answer for a lot of things, for example, when we were setting up a website of the company, none of us knew how to do it, but she has a lot of connections and she asks for their help. I asked if I could join her meetings with her friends about how to set up the website. We looked at other companies’ websites and we spent hours talking about what photos we should use and how we should describe her business. I am glad that I can be part of it. I can commit to her goal and I always feel excited to finish the tasks that she gives me. This it the first time that I actually enjoy working.
My company is a peer learning company that brings executives with the same role together and let them interact and learn from each other. Right now we have two groups of customers: VP Marketing and VP Engineering. Feedbacks of the peer learning dinner are good. People said they learn a lot by talk to their peers. The response rate of our campaign email usually reachs 20%. We are sure that executives have the needs of these peer learning meetings, but the problem is: who should we target and reach out to. We don’t want to waste time sending campaign emails to the wrong people. We want the right people to hear and know about us. I do researches on layers of companies in San Francisco, how many executives that a company usually have to help us learn about how big our marketing is. We have hyphthesis of what kinds of executives need our service and we send out campaign emails to test it out. For daily basis, I build lists of people’s contact information and group the people with same roles together. Then my boss will send them campaign emails and wait for their responses. For those who are interested on our service, we schedule calls with them and ask them some questions about what topics they want to talk about. After we got the confirmation, we send them invoices and start to match them, or if we don’t have right match for them, we will go to linkedin and try to find peers for them. My boss is in every dinner meet up to make sure that the talking is on the right topics and make sure everyone can learn something from the dinner.
I personally think that this is a very fun business to do, but we are a very new company that we are still trying very hard to figure ou the right way to go.