internshipIN

We received some great feedback from the readers over at TechCrunch. It was definitely overwhelming to see some of the passionate ideas and suggestions that readers had.

Two common reccuring questions appeared that we immediately wanted to address. The first was: Are we a business or some afterschool side project? The second question inquired about our value proposition — what makes us different in the increasingly crowded internship market?

These are great questions and luckily, easy for us to answer.

1. Are we a company?

Yup. We believe a company is an organization that finds a problem for a group of people, solves it for them, and receives payment in return. We do just that!

We found a problem. We found that large companies dominate college campuses and university recruitment efforts. This bothered both us, as students, because we didn’t want corporate-sponsored polarized views on what job opportunities are available. PLUS this obviously bothered the smaller companies who needed kick butt talent to build their teams.

We offer an unique solution. With internshipIN, startups can post their listings with their only competition being other startups and (coming soon) they will have access to our student databases, rating systems, personalized tracking features, etc.

We make money for providing a solution. All of our features will be available at a super affordable price. Although the price is minor in comparison to the service we provide, we will charge for our services so we can afford to make them better for you!

Currently, our product is at the very early stages of becoming the link between startups and students, but it gets closer every day.

2. How do we compete in such a crowded market?

This is simple. We aren’t competing. We adore the internship search services that already available from companies like YouIntern.com, Interneval.com, InternshipRatings.com, Craigslist, and so on.

We think they all do great jobs at fulfilling the mission to help students. However, our mission is different — we want to connect smaller companies with students specifically. We want to add smaller companies into the student arsenal and show them ALL of the opportunities that are available for building their careers. We know we can only do this by going beyond listings and reviews, and that’s what we plan to do!

What are your thoughts? What makes a business?

We’ve found maintaining workflow is one of the most difficult problems students have as an intern. Most of the boring, unpleasant work is dumped you - the human garbage disposal … er… the intern - and you consume the work as work experience. This method may work well for the average intern, but you’re not average.

Here’s my tip – find ONE goal you plan to achieve during your internship and make damn sure you accomplish it. Sure, you should gain as much experience as possible, but you should also walk away with something tangible.

Want to optimize your time at an internship? Here’s what you should do:

1. Find where you want to be after the internship (your goal)

2. Tell your boss your goal on the first day

3. Rank your assignments by how close they will get you to your goal.

The cool thing is this doesn’t just pertain to interns. Here’s a bit more real world application. At internshipIN, we’ve been talking with several employers from across the world (literally!). We recently made the decision to keep our launch restricted to the San Francisco Bay Area for now.

You have no idea how much we would love to connect talented interns with some of the most innovative startups in the globe, but if we are going to truly help people we need to do it well. We want you to love using internshipIN, and we can’t give you support if we are spread too thin.

Got any ideas on where we should go next? Shoot us an email at contact at internshipIN.com. We’d love to hear your thoughts.