Preface: I have enjoyed reading Alif’s internship adventures so much that I decided to start including them with our monthly CandyByte updates. However, this month Alif submitted a lengthy post and I was prepared to ask him to cut it down in order to fit in our most recent blog. Instead, I gave the lengthy post a quick read and loved it so much that I wanted to feature this story as a stand-alone blog post. Being with Candybox for as long as I have, it is always fascinating to see things from the perspective of a new intern. Enjoy the post!
Alif’s Agency Adventure:
What’s up, friends?
It’s Alif, your favorite intern here, back with another Candybyte featured post.
It’s been a little over a month since I started here and boy, I’ve got some awesome stuff that I want to share with you!
But wait, before I get into all that, I want to take a second here to share something pretty freakin’ awesome.
Ever since I did my famous debut (hehe) in Mahfuz’s Candybyte series, my LinkedIn inbox has been hot!
I’ve had marketing students, marketing professionals, and curious fans, asking me “…so, what’s it like working at Candybox?”.
How awesome is that? We’ve got our own little Candybox hype community going on!
Alright, now that my shameless spotlight is over, let me tell you a little bit about my journey here at Candybox.
If you’ve read my previous featured blog post on last month’s Candybyte then you’ll know that I come from a very corporate-like HR background. The company I was working for was pretty big, they had offices in Toronto, Poland, Tampa, and remote workers all over the world.
So you can imagine coming into a rapid-growing company like Candybox Marketing, it took a bit of time for me to adjust to it all. But as the weeks went by I started to learn more and more about myself. For example, I found that I actually really like working in a fast-paced environment like Candybox Marketing, here are a couple of reasons why.
First, working in a rapidly growing company I find that there’s less of all that “bureaucracy” stuff. This means implementing ideas and getting things moving is just so much faster than being at a large company that has 10 folds of hierarchy you need to get approval from.
So if I ever have an idea for a campaign or maybe a project, all I need to do is shoot Mahfuz a quick message, pop in a meeting, and BAM, let’s go!
Second, I think the people here are pretty talented, honestly speaking.
Just the other day I found out one of my coworkers here, Tim, produces beats as a side hustle. And not just that, he has 100k subs on his Youtube Channel and is just now in the process of receiving his 100K silver plaque award from Youtube.
Pretty awesome, right?
But wait it’s not just him, Darrell’s pretty cool too. I mean, he speaks at all these conferences, he’s an author of two books and drives a pretty cool car. And wait, don’t get me started on Mahfuz’s podcast, speaking gigs, and the book he wrote!
Like, there’s just A LOT of talent around here in our studio which is pretty freakin’ amazing!
Have you ever heard that saying, “knives sharpen knives”? Well, call the Candybox studio a knife drawer because there’s just so many knives around here!
Now, the third reason as to why I prefer to work in a fast-paced environment like Candybox is because I get to dip my toes into a lot of cool projects.
Here are just a mere fraction of the many projects I’ve been able to help out on here at Candybox Marketing…
- I’ve worked with Sven and Jade from the Launch 48 team on some pretty cool and very technical back end WordPress stuff. Now, I’m not a “professional developer” or anything like that but seeing what they do on a regular basis has formed a mad sense of respect for my fellow developers out there.
- Often times I help our project manager, Michael, take meeting notes whenever he’s pitching a client on a website we built for them. It’s super interesting to see how he handles curveball questions being thrown his ways and how he cleverly words his presentations.
- I also got to help Bethel, our landing page expert, and John, one of our campaign manager, write out a landing page for Darrell’s book! It was super cool to hear how Bethel lays out a landing page using UI design principals and how John, in a beautiful presentation, pitched Darrell on the marketing strategy behind how we’re going to sell his book.
- I’ve gotten to do some behind the scenes work with our videographer and content manager to create our first-ever Candybox podcast! I remember standing there in the room holding the camera and listening to the interview thinking, “wait, am I really creating a podcast for work? No way.”
- We held our first ever Candybox Marketing Conference! Take it in, A CONFERENCE. I mean, how many other companies out there put on a company conference? It was just so cool to be part of that whole process.
And those are just a mere fraction of the many things I’ve gotten to work on so far.
Now lastly, and this is a weird one, a big reason why I like working at Candybox is because everyone around here is a true marketer.
Let me give you a real-life example of what I mean (and keep in mind, I’m still getting used to this), whenever I’m working on something, like a blog for example, sometimes I’ll look up and see Mahfuz holding a camera straight at my face.
The first time this happened I asked him “whoa, what’s going on?” and he went on to explain that it was for our social media, “…everyone around here is used to it, trust me”.
It then hit me, wow, I’m sitting next to some serious marketers around here.
Weird, but cool, huh?
Anyways that’s it from me for this month’s Candybyte feature.
I hope I got you just as excited about Candybox as I am.
And hey, if you’d like to connect with me on LinkedIn, feel free to shoot me a connection request.
I’ll see you next month!
– Alif
