i3 Design/MeetSource Internship
Over the summer I worked at a Japanese technology company called i3Design. i3Design is a mid-sized firm of about 30 individuals which specializes in developing mobile websites for smartphones and tablets through a variety of services such as flamingo, a multi-device template for mobile websites, ZEBRA, a program that specializes in creating push notifications for customers, and SMARTCONVERT, a cloud-based server program for mobile websites.
They also run a website known as MeetSource.com which serves as an online marketplace for mobile application developers to buy and sell source code from each other.
During my time at i3Design, I worked on the MeetSource side of the service, working to recruit and communicate with existing developers and potential customers. My job involved reaching out to developers of mobile applications to try and recruit them to our website. I did this by telling them about our website and the services we provided to developers in allowing them a place to sell code that they had developed but may not have been able to use for themselves for whatever reason. I also listened to them discuss what they wanted from a developer marketplace and what features they desired if they were going to participate. If there was a common desire that developers had that was not present on our website, I prepared a report for our CEO Yoichiro Shiba and let him know that these were things the website should consider implementing in some form in order to increase their appeal to developers.
I also worked to increase awareness of our brand among potential customers, namely people who were interested in buying code to sell as an application but may not be accomplished developers themselves. These types of customers did not have overlap with the developers who sold on the site as they brought new capital into the marketplace and would increase sales. I did this by running a social media campaign which included sharing news and articles from the mobile application and tech community and interspersing these tweets with promotions about our brand. This would develop our brand by creating a relationship with our following who would see us as a valuable source of information, increase awareness of our brand thanks to followers sharing our posts with their own following, and promoting our own product to increase our customer base.
Finally, I got to study from the companies developers about the applications they work with and what they consider best practices for designing a website. This gave me a much better understanding about what professional developers do on a day to day basis and how they go about doing their work.
All in all, this internship was an enriching experience that allowed me to gain valuable professional experience, both in tech and business, while also seeing how companies in other cultures work and operate.