300 Hour Experience:
The Egg LA

I was part of a start-up team with two fellow Duke Innovation and Entrepreneurship students, Asher Early and Liam Clark, where I led Content and Design at The Egg. This experience was integral to my growth as an entrepreneur as I was interested in diving deeper into ideation techniques building a product that would be useful for students like me who were struggling to find startup opportunities and connections to like-minded innovators. Since we also built the online community hub from scratch, it allowed me to gain first hand experience with everything from brainstorming to beta testing and I was able to directly implement what we learned in the I&E foundational course to this product.

 

As the Content and Design Lead, I led the processes for creating a brand and thus oversaw all designs to well-model the mission of The Egg. For the hands on components of the role, I iterated color schemas and logos, created content for our social media pages, and developed a bi-weekly newsletter, further implementing marketing techniques to publish these media across various channels. Working with a small team, I also took on responsibilities similar to that of a product marketing manager, where I evaluated our product's position in the market, researched competing brands, analyzed metrics from social media engagement, and strategized feasible marketing timelines to reach our audience's preferences and the startup's expansion goals. 

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My learning objectives for this experience were to personally expand my knowledge of B2B and B2C marketing strategies and to overall build my foundation for campaign management experience. In terms of design, I wanted to gain more familiarity with software from Adobe Illustrator to Figma and deepen my unique design style. I also aimed to cultivate strong organizational and communication skills, become familiar with analytics tools, and execute different leadership responsibilities across various disciplines within the startup. I knew I had reached these goals as the startup expanded to reach different universities across the US and Canada and gained traction after our formal launch. There was visible visual improvement in my designs after synthesizing feedback and I felt grateful and fulfilled having been able to take on a variety of tasks that I now have basal knowledge of.

 

Since I am on the technology and design pathway, this experience allowed me to tackle hands-on projects where my contributions significantly impacted product success, which was extremely rewarding. I was able to apply my knowledge of product ideation and placement strategies from my I&E special topics course and also greatly sharpened my skills in UX/UI having designed components and worked with software engineers to create a mission-driven, customer-centered website. Being able to dip in to these fields of work allowed me to combine my interests for UX, tech, and business and these aspects have inspired me to pursue a career path along product management or product marketing management. I greatly enjoyed my time at the start-up and would not have traded any other internship experience for this opportunity.