Closing the loop.
The last time I posted about my internship I was talking about a startup called Storably, an online market place for parking and storage. Today my Internship is at the same company, with almost the same team, except our product is completely different. Today the startup is called Curalate, which I am delighted to say I was around early enough in the product’s life that I had the opportunity to come up with the name. Curalate is the the worlds most robust tool for brands and advertising agencies to keep track of their influence on the growing social network, Pinterest.
Curalate uses an image fingerprinting technology that crawls Pinterest for a specific companies products. The tool then gives the brand an interface where they can track interactions with each of their products in the form of pins, repins, likes, comments, and tweets. Ultimately a brand would use Curalate to determine which of their products are most popular on Pinterest, and eventually discover how their Pinterest efforts are resulting in traffic and sales on their respective websites.
My primary role became lead generation. I was tasked with creating multiple spreadsheets detailing companies that already use Pinterest as well as companies in the Fortune 500 that would likely pay for an analytics service like Curalate. I compiled a list of every company in the Fortune 500 as well as brands they own under their umbrella. Nexr we went back through the list and searched LinkedIn and Twitter for key individuals to reach out to at these organizations. (community managers, digital marketers, new media strategists) Simultaneously the team was refining Curalate, adding features, cleaning up the design and responding to feedback from our beta clients. After this point we had a long list of leads that we could reach out to on twitter and e-mail.
More recently I became involved in converting these leads into clients. Once there was a mechanism in place on the website to allow individuals to express interest in Curalate, we were able to invite select users to join our platform. This involved reaching out to their Social Media team, and following up with the information necessary to put them in our system.
I was happy to the find that over the course of this semester my responsibilities gradually started to change as the business was growing. We went from a product that was just an idea on paper, to a full fledged analytics platform with a complicated code base and gorgeous user interface. Today we are representing over 150 brands, and expect to grow drastically in the coming weeks.
