This is how you get internships at startups.

Aug 12, 2024

Colab Squad

In the realm of internships, one of the most sought-after experiences is interning at a startup. While this is an excellent way to gain raw, hands-on experience, the primary focus for any intern should be on honing their craft.

Working at a startup is undeniably a significant amount of work! Remember, all startups are experiments, and as with any experiment, the outcome can go either way:

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✅ Success

If the experiment succeeds, it’s fantastic! Keep doing what you were doing and double down on it.

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💥 Explosions

This is where you grow the most. In situations where nothing seems to go right, and everyone is struggling to keep the ship afloat, you’ll challenge your ways of working, refine your processes, and discover innovative solutions.

Startups often face explosive challenges. They take various routes to make their product work. Interns who are ready for this can be a solid asset for startups.

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🚫 Failure

It’s when things don’t work out. When working with solid teams, this can actually be a winning point for you. Remember, failure happens when nothing works out despite multiple attempts. This constant iteration prepares you for uncomfortable situations, which is exactly what founders want. Be prepared for these challenges.

Explode → Try a fix → Doesn’t work → Try another fix → Rinse and repeat → Didn’t workout

A lot of startup gurus will tell you to "actually care about the company." While caring is important, it’s more about contributing meaningfully to the process, moving the company forward, and making it easier for the team to function - All with your craft! The better you become at something, the more resourceful you are, and the better your chances of growing in your career. Take a look at the history, some of the top folks in various domains are the people who contributed to a company at an early stage helping it to grow and proving to be an asset. Their efforts not only helped the companies, but build their unique identity in the professional space. A few people who I can name of:

👋 Jess Lee

👋 Mary Yang

How do you get better at a craft?

There’s no easy way, It’s pure hard work! An iterative process, of figuring out various approaches, to build a conclusive understanding of how anything works. Whether it’s working with data, design, marketing, operations, or running a business, once you can demonstrate these skills with concrete examples, it’s time to get yourself in the market and broadcast your availability. Let’s consider 2 cases:

Scenario 1

You are interning at a startup and your team assigns you a task to get a way to reduce the CAC(Cost of Acquiring Customer). You start to gather the info about the current situation of customer acquisition strategy and work on better ways, something that literally unconventional. Like how Airbnb found their first customers for AirBnB, or how tinder solved the chicken or egg problem.

Scenario 2

Same situation and this time you are figuring out social media, performance marketing, paid stuff, etc. Just the usual things that every other company on the planet does.

For above situation, a well read, experienced person will go with scenario-1 given they understand speed and execution over the scenario-2 which usually takes both time and money to show results. Now obviously, this wouldn’t be the case if you dont have the experience or the directions. And this is exactly when your research, failing-and-doing-it-again attitude will come to say the day.

BTW, the cohorts at Colab are designed just for this. We help you carve your craft and then test your skills with micro-internships. This is us working on the thesis to understand consumer journey for the company to increase the traffic and find drop points where the customer bounces off from.

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