To anyone who doesn’t follow me on social media, it may seem like I’ve just up and abandoned this blog. In truth, what was happening was a very frantic cross-country move, and my first week at a brand-new job at a digital marketing startup in San Francisco, California. It’s a trusim that one can either explore or exploit: that is, one can find new opportunities, or utilize the ones one already has. There is a third option, though: explain. So in all, you can either find new opportunities, utilize the ones you’ve got, or write about what you’ve learned from it all. At present, I’ve done my exploring and am exploiting as best I can, but that doesn’t leave a lot of time to explain.
So from here on out, since I do like documenting stuff, I’ll be writing a series of blog posts about what I’m doing at my job, how I’m living in California on a crazy low budget, and as always, general stuff about life, the universe, and everything. Y’know, this blog’s usual content.
Today, I’d like to explain what I’ve been doing in my first week at Upgrow, that marketing startup I mentioned. I’ll talk about my finances in a later post, write about a really interesting guest speaker we had on our weekly Praxis Wednesday call this past week, and maybe I’ll also write about the process of moving cross-country in ten days.
Our office is in a co-working space in downtown San Francisco. The room only has seven desks in it, two of which are presently empty. (One of these will be filled by my Praxis pal Yitzchak, who decided to move on a longer timeline and work remotely in the interim.) This small office means that there’s no complicated structure of meetings that needs to happen: to communicate something company-wide, all we need to do is say it, or post it to the general Slack channel.
The biggest thing I’ve learned this week is how hectic startups can be. Last week—my first week—I took on projects for three of our SEO clients; this week, I’m adding the other three. I’m running as fast as I can just to keep up. As I was just starting Praxis, an alum talked about how starting his apprenticeship felt like drinking from a fire hose. Now that I’m here, I understand the sentiment.
On top of working, I’ve been completing some marketing certifications, reading up on the industry software, and generally making myself a more valuable employee. My direct supervisor is big on trying to make sure that we don’t have to take work home, but I enjoy watching marketing videos as I get ready in the morning. I’ve never much liked the idea of “work-life balance” anyways: if you care enough about either one, you’ll figure out how to fit them in. My mom worked rigorously at multiple startups while pregnant with me; ’nuff said.
The project I’m most proud of from this week is the one I did started on my very first day. One of Upgrow’s founders, Ryder, asked me to take over the LinkedIn marketing for one of our clients, a lock and security company called ASSA ABLOY. I created all the posts for this week for both of their campaigns (which works out to one post per day), and on Friday I made the ones for the next week. Turns out, I don’t even need those till the week after (that is, starting next Monday, 3/25 instead of 3/18), so I’m ahead of schedule.
This week, I’m continuing the projects I’ve already been assigned (they include suggestions for blog categories, keyword research, and local marketing with Google MyBusiness) and adding several new ones, for clients including Seal Software, InfluxData, and Mercer Advisors.
As a final note: after I get settled in this role, I’ll be resuming my study of machine learning and add more PDP updates, but I want to make sure I’m doing well at this new job first.