Prototyping An Internship Platform

Pittsburgh is a college town. Students are everywhere, but unless you have a direct pipeline through the university, it can be hard to recruit kids.

As a student, two years ago, I was asked regularly if I could help find interns for startups and projects others were working on. I got asked often enough that I thought there could be real value in finding a solution, so I tried to build one.

And it sucked, for three reasons.

1. I ran it through a newsletter through MailChimp, which is much less accessible than a platform needs to be.
2. I wanted credit for every student-to-startup interaction, so I chose to make personal introductions myself whenever a student wanted. Not only does that take way more time than necessary, but it's selfish and irrelevant to the actual product offering.
3. I had absolutely no clue how to advertise to students, and over the 6-month lifecycle of the project, I was only able to build a userbase of 100.

But over the past two years, I've been building Moss Generation, an exclusive social network for early-stage investable tech startups in Pittsburgh. Through it, my access to startups grown, and I would be able to offer significantly more internship proposals than before.

In the past, even though I conducted so many logistics poorly, I was still able to place three students in local startups, and there was a positive impact.

So on the EntrepreNERD live stream, I experimented and built out how to re-create the platform, keeping my failures in mind.

I used Google Sheets, Google Forms, and the basic Wix site that I ran the platform through in the past.

What's fun about this, is that besides buying and connecting a domain through Wix ($13/month) this is all free to maintain. I don't need the Wix site by any means, and I'll likely find a cheaper option for a landing page creator. Plus, the Wix site was primarily for the newsletter signup, but we wouldn't be using MailChimp this time.

Instead, we source postings for internships through my group, Moss Generation, on a Google Form. We connect that form to Google Sheets and make it look pretty. We live-embed the Sheet to the Wix website and hand the sourcing of deals off to clubs at all the local universities.

We market it as a tool for startup clubs, entrepreneurship clubs, innovation clubs, venture capital clubs, technology clubs, and anyone else that might be interested in finding startup internships. We let the leaders of each club market it to their own students, instead of trying frantically to get on newsletters and social media posts with more general audiences.

To make sure we get quality internship postings, the platform will have built-in education for the students, so if someone posts about asking a student to "handle their social media for free" (as many startups often do) then the google sheet will see that (through a conditional [=IF] statement) and educate the students on how lame those internships can be if you have more applicable skillsets.

To make sure we get quality interns, I'll include a video in the google form that educates the startups on what to expect from the students.

And that's it.

In theory, it should run itself after the infrastructure is built. (Though I doubt it will be that simple)

Wonderful things can be prototyped through extremely simple tools, and you should never assume to create a product or a platform you need to know how to code. Most things are open source if you just look for them.

If you want to join my live streams, follow me on Twitch. I'm building up to doing them twice a week, and we experiment with how to build, run, and advertise little businesses like this every time.

--If you personally want to build out some function of this in your city, or for your university, please shoot me a message and let's hop on a call to discuss how I can help. The main issue you'll run into is sourcing the startups effectively, and I can help you build that kind of local network.--

Here's the full live stream recorded on YouTube.