From Doctor to Marketer

Finding your path when it isn’t paved

Mom wanted one doctor, but instead she got two arts majors.

In Grade 9, I had the pleasure of accompanying my mom to the hospital for “Take Your Kids to Work Day” where she worked as a nurse in the cardiology department. Being both a South-Asian parent and a medical professional, she was ecstatic to hear about my interest in medicine. My brother was pursuing an arts degree (and presumably law school) so I was destined for med school. 

That was, until I started high school math. My dismal mathematics career was countered by my extra-curriculars, where I excelled in DECA, a high school business competition, and student voice activities. My love for public speaking and interpersonal skills made business school a natural choice. 

Although I did not know it at the time, this was the first time I made a conscious career choice. I recognized a deficiency in one area, and a skill in another. This has, and continues to be, the driving force behind my professional aspirations.

Just Work at It 

I always faced criticism that I wasn’t bad at math or science, I simply didn’t work hard enough at it. While many people (myself included) fail due to mindset, reality also needs to set in. If there’s one thing you can take from this blog post, it’s this: 

1. Your academic and professional aspirations should always align with your goals. 

Sure I could have continued in math and science, and probably been a solid B student. The challenge there was that I wanted to be a doctor, and med school simply isn’t possible with Bs. 

Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his bestseller, Antifragile, notes how those who thrive off disruption are most successful. Pursuing med school with a B average is waiting for disruption (rejection), while building a new skillset in anticipation of a new pathway was thriving off it. 

Herd Mentality 

Coming to Western, I was dead set on the Ivey HBA program. Their recent employment report sheds some light on the composition of the program, with a whopping 52% of graduates ending up in either finance or consulting. I wasn’t especially interested in finance, so I gravitated towards consulting, which is complemented by the Ivey case-based learning method. 

I joined a number of clubs in first year, with Western’s Marketing Association being one of them. 

As I progressed through my first year, I gave a lot more thought to my goals. Specifically, I started to question why I wanted to do consulting in the first place. My reasoning boiled down to: 

I don’t know what I want to do in business. Consulting gives you exposure to a number of industries and you learn a lot quickly. 

This is good reasoning, but it dodges the initial question: what are my goals? Consulting internships don’t start until 3rd year, and simply waiting for that didn’t make sense. The door would always be open — so my resolution became this: 

To dive deeper into my interests, and learn more about what interests me. 

A New Approach 

I began to read a lot more about technology and business; getting daily updates on the tech scene from LAUNCH Ticker and Mattermark, while gaining expert insight from Tomasz Tunguz and Mark Suster. I love learning how B2B companies scaled their sales and marketing, and how B2C companies adapted their features to fit new audiences. 

But that wasn’t enough. Even in technology and business, the pool is too vast. After all, which business student would turn down offer to work at Airbnb or Google? This brought me to my second conclusion in my career path: 

2. It’s not good enough to be a generalist. You need to do what you love, and be amazing at it. 

So naturally, I had to dig even deeper into not just what I was interested in, but what got me excited. If I pursued a career that I truly enjoyed and was not intrinsically disadvantaged in (like my doctor ambitions), then I could more easily learn and grow to become a master of it. 

I learned a ton by doing remote/contract marketing for Turnstyle, a tech startup in Toronto.

This was marketing. Everything from content creation to paid advertisements, and email marketing to SEO was fascinating to me. I wasn’t particularly good at all of them, and some I had yet to experience, but the goal alone was enough to drive me. 

Like many other career paths, there were resources galore. I started with Neil Patel webinars and the Hubspot blog to better understand the field. I’ve bundled some of the most helpful pieces below. 

Eventually, towards the end of second year, I knew my path. I was en route to becoming a true marketer — so what’s next? 

The Road Ahead

This past week was my first as a business operations intern with Shopify. I expected to leverage my marketing and sales background to really propel the team, but instead was challenged to tackle a new skill: Data. 

Although I am immensely proud of my liberal arts education, my current team is split between engineers with MBAs and math grads with computer science experience. While I could have shied away from the challenge, I instead came to my third conclusion: 

3. Even the pros have weak spots. Work on owning yours. 

Marketing is data-driven, plain and simple. Your ad spend needs to be tracked, and your content created based on customer data. Even though math was scary, at this point I knew that to be a killer marketer, it was a skill I needed to acquire. 

This was HTML source code pasted into Atom. 

I don’t need to be the best, but I need to be capable. A killer marketer is that much more powerful when they understand the other components of the business, and how their work fits into that bigger picture. 

I never had (and still don’t have) everything figured out, but I realized that I needed to constantly be questioning what I was doing, and why. I think wherever I am in my career, these three take-aways will apply and continue to point me to my true North. 

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How to Rock Your Internship

3 Tips to Getting the Most Out of Your Summer  

No one wore a suit at Shopify… Even a tie was questionable

Two weeks into my summer internship with Shopify, I was feeling lost. After completing the laundry list of tasks my manager had assigned, everything I did felt “day-to-day”, with little purpose behind the projects. I wasn’t learning as much as I wanted to, and even worse, I felt like I was underperforming. 

With many smaller companies, I found this is often the case. Teams are small and move quickly, making it hard to find ways to integrate an intern into long-term projects without hurting overall productivity. I mentioned in my last post that this was the reason a lot of startups aren’t open to taking on interns. 

However, there are steps you can take to ensure you find your groove quickly at your new job, and make the most of the time you have available. 

1. Find work, don’t wait for it 

Coming into my role at Shopify, there were about 10 tasks that were laid out for the sales interns to accomplish. We worked quickly, so within about 3–4 weeks, we had finished all the tasks. Our manager didn’t have the time to create new projects, so most of our work following that was day-to-day and added less value than we wanted. 

I spoke with a few other friends at the company who had been there for a while, and they were not surprised. Shopify did this intentionally. 

There are companies where you get clear work everyday. Then there’s other companies where the problems are clear, but you need to find the solutions. Then there’s Shopify… You have to find the problem and the solution. 

You are able to do your best work when you don’t just know the problem, you fall in love with it. And that’s the approach that Shopify took — if you find the problem yourself, you’ll be dedicated to solving it. 

Squadify: The Shopify Waterloo intern team.

So what does this mean for interns? It means you need to dive deep into the company and the work you’re doing. I spent a lot of time digging through sales data and speaking with co-workers before I found key problems that I wanted to tackle. 

At Shopify (and most startups) it’s a meritocracy, so if you present a solid case to solving a problem, you can get the approval to tackle it. I spent the next few weeks working with another intern on a script that did automated lead scraping via Google and LinkedIn, saving each sales hacker around 10 hours per week. I found a problem I was passionate about and delivered a solution I was proud of, making my internship feel a lot more valuable. 

2. Combine what you know with what you don’t 

I came in with the assumption that internships were all about learning, and while that will happen, don’t expect to learn everything. You should have a firm grasp on what you can do, what you know you can do, and what you want to try. Let’s clear things up with an example: your boss wants you to create a whitepaper on the food & beverage industry in New York, and here are your potential responses. 

Category 1: Jobs you can do/have done

I definitely can! I made another whitepaper a few months ago on the taxi industry in New York, so this should be no problem. 

Category 2: Jobs you know how to do

I’ll give it a shot! I haven’t done it before, but I’ve read up on the components of whitepapers and have a good idea of how to approach it. 

Category 3: Jobs you want to try 

No idea what a whitepaper entails, but I’m happy to give it a shot! 

Jobs in #1 are easy to get since you have experience, but jobs in #2 are what you’re really looking for, as it’s where you really learn. At Shopify, I knew how sales pipelines worked, but I never built one. When the project came up, I knew enough to get the responsibility, but still learned from practicing new skills. 

HackDays: Shopify's internal hackathon, where you get to ship a project with a new team. 

It’s not that you should avoid jobs in #3, but it’s unlikely you will get them. If your manager wants to get something done and you have no experience or idea how to tackle it, they’re better off doing it themselves. However, if you see jobs in #3, the best thing you can do is practice them on your own time. 

At Shopify, I was curious about lead generation, and started to read up on it. Near the end of my internship, I was able to convince the growth team to involve me in one of their lead generation projects. Had I not read up on the topic area, I would have probably just slowed the team down. 

3. Explore anything that interests you 

During one of my interview rounds with Shopify, I had a challenging chat with one of the sales managers. He asked me why I wanted to work at Shopify, and I jumped into a response about loving sales, and how it both rewards hustle and yields tangible value for my work. His response changed the way I approach the internship. 

You can learn sales anytime in your life, and at any company. The value in this internship is getting the chance to work at a rocketship like Shopify, and the experiences you can have. 

He was right. Sales was great, but the opportunity to be part of the inner workings of an explosive company was even better. I learned a lot about various other departments, like customer success and engineering, and even found a better fit with business operations, where I’m interning this summer. 

I learned a minimal amount of Javascript last summer, but all of it was applicable! 

I did this by exploring everything that interested me — if an engineering project sounded intriguing, I’d chat with them about it. Eventually by August I discovered a lead generation project with the Growth team, who worked at a different office, which really exposed my passion for marketing. 

At the end of the day, internships are a 4-mth opportunity to explore your interests, so pigeon-holing yourself in one department limits your experience. Be sure to talk to others and see what interests you, because you never know what you might find. 

Not sure where to start? I’m sharing a sample deck with my email newsletter that I’m presenting to Shopify to make the most of my summer internship. Subscribe below for access! 

How to Get a Summer Internship

3 Easy Steps to Finding a Summer Job 

As my phone rang, butterflies ran through my stomach. I’d spent the last few weeks sending countless emails to startups, asking about the potential to intern for them and finally got a phone meeting. 

While I did a bit of prep work by looking over their website, I was banking on my personality and business knowledge to carry me through. After all, I did DECA in high school and felt pretty prepared for what they could throw at me 😂.

After a bit of small talk, the question finally came: 

“So what do you want to do for our company?” 

I immediately jumped into my spiel about my background in business, extra-curricular activities, and eagerness to learn. There was an awkward silence, followed by another question: 

“We don’t have time for interns. What exactly can you do?” 

Students generally have limited work experience, so it may seem impossible to answer a question like this. Through this process, I faced a few obstacles to getting an internship and learned how to overcome them. 

Problem 1: They aren’t looking for interns

Half of all available jobs are not posted online, and this is even higher for startups that don’t have dedicated recruiters. With a headcount of 10–30 people, many of which are developers, the thought of hiring an intern probably never comes to mind. So when you do suggest it in an email, most startups might see it as too much of a hassle to bother with. 

Solution 1: Make them think they need you

I skimmed the website for a phone interview, but that doesn’t make me stand out. Spending an hour researching the company and the industry can show you are genuinely interested in working there AND help you figure out how you can contribute. I recently sourced an internship for a startup, and one supplementary piece I received is below: 

Mikael Cho from Crew also wrote a great post on how you can stand out of the pile, with direct examples. 

Problem 2: I don’t have any work experience

Out of all my extra-curriculars, the majority had one of two outcomes: event-planning experience (i.e. conferences) or fundraising experience. With a startup, neither of these are particularly relevant to day-to-day operations or an intern. So you need to find ways to work past that. 

Solution 2: Get experience through your interests 

If you’re interested in email marketing, building a newsletter using Mailchimp for your interest in cars can be a start. If you’re interested in data, Tableau has a free student version that you can play around with. There is also a ton of literature out there on these practices, i.e. marketers like Sujan Patel and Om Malik. 

While you may not have experience, you can show passion. This immediately sets you apart from the crowd, and shows the hiring manager exactly what you want to learn. This makes it easy for them to see where you fit in, and where you can grow. 

Problem 3: I don’t know anyone at the company

I love my parents, but mechanics and nurses aren’t the best for giving hot referrals to tech companies. Having a referral at a company is very important, but it doesn’t have to be a long-standing or family relationship. At startups, the point of contact might be the CEO or VP Marketing, given the small team. 

Solution 3: Start reaching out to people 

LinkedIn is an incredible tool to finding people that work at the company you’re targeting. Simply searching “Marketing at Company X” will return a plethora of results, as seen below. 

You can then use free tools like Hunter and Verify Email to get their email if it’s not listed, or reach out via other mediums like Twitter. 

Your Game Plan 

I want to make this as easy as possible, so here’s your 3-step game plan on how to get an internship. 

Step 1: Make a list of companies

Using tools like Crunchbase or directories like MaRS DD and Ryerson DMZ, you can find tons of local startups that you are interested in. Make a shortlist of ~ 50 that you find intriguing. 

Step 2: Find contacts 

Use the tools listed above to find people who work at the company and their emails/contact info. You can use an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of who you’ve reached out to, and what meetings you have. I recently was introduced to a free tool called Huntr that helps you manage recruitment. 

Step 3: Do some research and see where you fit in 

After you’ve identified your interests, dig into the company and see where you might be able to add value. I found that making a slide deck or one-pager is very helpful, though you may want to wait until after you secure a meeting to do that. 

At the beginning of the school year, I started religiously using this method to find marketing opportunities. Although a lot of my cold emails didn’t get responses, I eventually got one. I then got introduced to the appropriate person; here’s the email chain: 

Names and other details whited out, though it’s proof the method works!

Once I learned what their needs were, I put together a deck on what I could bring to the team. By the end of September I had a part-time, paid job! 

Bonus Step: Sign up for my email newsletter

I’ll start by sending you my personal slide deck to give a template on showing your skills, experience, and interests. You’ll also be the first to know about new posts on career tips and industry interviews, along with a curated crop of job postings. 

NHL to the Valley

Why your career is a path, not a choice. 

Disclaimer: Patrick did not actually play in the NHL. 

This is part of my Valley interview series, featuring a diverse range of marketers. For some context, read this post to learn why I went to the Valley and then this post to see what I learned. 

My path into tech marketing has thus far been one of advanced planning and precise calculation. Like many students, I worry about getting a job I like, and so I put a lot of effort into learning skills and having experiences that make me an ideal candidate. Patrick Frost taught me that having a strong profile is more important than having a clear path.

Humble Beginnings 

Patrick studied history at Denison University, a small liberal arts college in Ohio, primarily to play varsity soccer. Knowing a full-time career would be quite time-consuming, Patrick prioritized two things he loved: travel and skiing. He spent 2 months travelling across the West Coast, eventually settling in San Francisco; a big city with access to mountains nearby. 

Patrick has always been passionate about sports, so naturally he jumped into the sports industry after graduation. He spent more than 10 years working for the San Jose Sharks in sales. Here, Patrick championed a number of areas including ticket programs, partnerships, and offline marketing. It was fun, but he was restless. 

I wanted a new challenge, and tech seemed like it. Being in the Valley, I’m always hearing the buzz and following the trends, but never as a direct contributor to it. 

Most people might assume here that Patrick made the jump directly into tech marketing, but this wasn’t exactly the case. Square was at a young age and didn’t have a sales team, which would have fit his skillset. His eventual role? Customer Support.

Patrick and I chatted in one of these alcoves. 

Hard Work Pays Off 

Albite not the most glamorous role at a tech company, Patrick was determined to work at Square and was happy to start at Customer Support to learn the product from the ground up. He worked hard to build rapport at Square, harvesting relationships within the company and keeping an eye out for new opportunities. A year into the job, that opportunity came.

Starting as a Channel Marketing Manager, Patrick used his existing knowledge to develop association partnerships for Square and run marketing events, all with the goal of user acquisition. Being in a new industry, he still faced a variety of challenges and had to learn quickly. 

Never Stop Learning

One area that Patrick emphasized was learning how to frame problems. In order to get approval for new campaigns, he needed to find the right data and present it in a way that proved to his team members that he deserved the resources. 

Now focused on Marketing & Partnerships for Square Canada, I asked Patrick what he was keen on learning next. He mentioned, coincidentally, that the position of product manager was the next thing on his plate. 

I have a good grasp of sales and marketing, but you need to really understand what other teams do in order to get the ball rolling. That means diving into areas that you aren’t necessarily comfortable in.

Quick action shot before leaving the premises.

Plan for Growth, Not Careers 

What I learned from Patrick was not that you need to start in support to get to your desired role, but rather that you need to focus on optimizing for learning and not for future roles. Doing the latter might mean you’re looking for an opportunity when there isn’t one, but always being prepared puts you in a much more desirable boat. 

I personally plan on pursuing something called t-shaped learning. The idea is to have a good grasp of the various areas in your practice, and have a strong expertise in 1–2 areas. For me, that means understanding SEO, paid advertisements, and data management, while going deep on areas like email marketing and customer segmentation. 

Getting work experience from ground zero can be difficult; subscribe to my email newsletter and get an EXCLUSIVE piece on how you can start. 

Marketer or Engineer?

Turning a fear of numbers into a passion for numbers to succeed in growth marketing.

I sat on the sofa to the right, in case you were wondering. 

This is part of my Valley interview series, featuring a diverse range of marketers. For some context, read this post to learn why I went to the Valley and then this post to see what I learned. 

If he rattled off his skills, you wouldn’t guess that Axel Amar was a growth marketer. With a commanding knowledge of statistics, experience working with SQL and Python, and the ability to write code, he might sound more like an engineer than someone that went to business school. But for Axel, those are just some of the necessities of the role. 

An Odd Start

Axel started at Turo, a P2P car rental service, in early 2014 as a growth intern. For many business students in France, San Francisco might not seem like a popular destination, but Axel was not new to travel. He had already completed a data internship in Malaysia and was looking for a new challenge. Growth marketing may seem like an odd jump for most, however many skills were transferable. 

For startups like Turo, everything you do needs to be backed by data. Whether it’s an ad campaign, an incentive program, or even a small tweak to the signup process, it needed to be quantifiable. Being comfortable with numbers, Axel had little trouble building a case for his work.

Turo has since grown to more than 150 employees with $80m+ in funding

From Intern to Manager 

After completing his final year of school, Axel returned to Turo full-time in July 2015. Despite having lots of good ideas, the team didn’t have the resources to implement them. Developing marketing campaigns and analysis are not always the top priority for engineers and data scientists. So Axel did what any marketer would do; he learned how to do both.

Having a solid base in statistics meant picking up SQL and bits of Python for practical use wasn’t that challenging, and an existing background in programming allowed him to champion the project himself. Just a year later, Axel was promoted to Growth Manager and a lot more responsibility. 

Not an Anomaly 

While Axel’s story does sound extraordinary, he assures me it isn’t the case. 

Being able to understand and present basics statistics is key to be a successful marketer. Some business degrees have a lot of mathematics and statistics classes, especially in Europe. On our Growth team, David studied both business and engineering and this versatility helps him a lot in his day-to-day work

Even with a well-rounded background, Axel is still trying to learn more. He mentioned that being able to present well and visualize data is a key skill in growth marketing. 

Makes sense? Let’s give it a shot. 

Say we wanted to test an idea on the Turo web page below. We’ll break down the process and list the data we need to back it.

Hypothesis: By changing the copy from “Rent a car Anywhere” to “Make Your Own Schedule” and the button from “Find a car now” to “Explore the City”, conversion to renting a car will increase. 

Reasoning: People use Turo because public transportation is hard to plan, and they want to see the city on their own schedule. 

Data Needed: Percentage of people that use Turo (1) outside their home city (2) for more than one day (assume vacation), top frequented cities for Turo, walkability of city, reliability of public transportation in city 

Data to Track: Frequency of multi-day rentals in target cities, drop-off rate on web page compared to old page

This is a simplified example, but the case is clearly outlined and is a lot easier to pitch if backed by data. Even if the campaign fails, it was not a ‘random test’ but rather a calculated attempt at increasing conversions. 

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Silicon Valley 101

My biggest take-aways and realizations from my trip to the Bay Area. 

Building a $19B company was a lot easier than I imagined. 

It was 5am on the Wednesday of reading break, and my blaring alarm seemed further than ever. I looked over at my roommate (which wasn’t hard given the tiny bed we were sharing) and we were both thinking the same thing. While our friends were boozing in Mexico, we had the bright idea of ‘discovering the Valley’. There had to be a reason.

In my last post, I mentioned I wanted to go to San Francisco to better understand the work/life culture there and what it took to break into product marketing. Throughout the week, I absorbed countless pieces of advice, insights, and general observations about life in the Valley. Taken with a grain of salt, here are the main things I learned.

1. It's not the company, it's what you do

Walking down Market Street, I saw the offices of Uber, Square, Twitter, and countless other dynamic tech companies. I imagined how incredible it would be to work for any of these companies, regardless of the position. 45 minutes later, after my meeting in that same building, I realized I was a little naive.

Not pictured: the security guard wondering if he should ask me for ID. 

Airbnb received over 50,000 applications for just 300 jobs in 2015. It’s no question that Airbnb is a competitive place to work, but once you get there, it’s a different story. What you accomplish is far more important than role description. Marketing means nothing if there aren’t any conversions, as does sales if you aren’t hitting quota.

Engineers breed products, marketers breeds leads, and sales reps breeds deals (revenue). I found there is an emphasis of cohesiveness in the Valley; failing to know how you contribute to the bigger picture makes your job obsolete. 

Takeaway: I learned that I need to start focusing more on what the results of the campaigns I run were, instead of what I did to create them. “Increased email conversions by 79%” is a lot more impactful than “Created email campaigns”. 

2. There is no 'right' way to build your career 

I came into my trip expecting to find the perfect path to breaking into product marketing. After a week, my ‘perfect path’ included ad agency work, group sales for an NHL team, and management consulting. It also included having technical skills in statistics and data science, an education from a top tier school, and a plethora of soft skills that a seasoned CEO wouldn’t have, let alone a new graduate.

Takeaway: I learned there is NOT one right way to build your career. People gravitate to different jobs based on interest and personal fit, and the best thing I could do is optimize for learning. I needed to constantly challenge myself with the roles I took on, and always look where to improve.

Two liberal arts majors, but only one runs a billion dollar company. 

3. You need to be the best  

I’ve been in group projects where one person isn’t pulling their weight, but the team always manages to make up for it. Engineers in the Valley make upwards of $130,000 USD, which means for tech companies, they literally can’t afford to hire and retain people that don’t perform. Initially this was intimidating, but it also yielded a new realization.

Being in the Valley means you are surrounded by high caliber people. Colleagues that willingly work from 9am to 9pm, and manage their side hustles on the weekend. Old mantras like “leave after your boss does” are replaced by a sense of drive and purpose that your entire environment emanates. If you can keep up.

Takeaway: I learned that there isn’t room for mediocrity in the Valley. I found an area that interested me, now I needed to start honing the skills I had and start developing the skills I didn’t.

Tracking results is a lot easier when you have the right tools at your disposal, and know how to use them. I’ll be sending out an exclusive overview of the exact tools you need to track and improve your marketing game. 

Subscribe below to discover the essential tools for product marketers :) 

Canucks in the Bay

Deciphering the hype and finding out what makes the Valley tick. 

Sunny California was not all that it seemed (literally). 

For anyone interested in getting into the tech scene, joining high-growth companies that are changing the way we live on a day-to-day basis, the Bay area is the gold standard. Having experienced the pinnacle of Canadian tech and looking to take my skills to the next level, I decided to commit my reading break to understanding the Valley. 

I’ve spent the last 6 months honing my skills in product marketing, getting hands-on experience creating the email nurture campaigns, lead scoring, and site funnel layouts for some cutting-edge startups. At first glance, it might seem like I’m ahead of the curve.

But to be honest, I’m a little confused. 

Product marketing is a mystical beast. It encompasses so many diverse areas of a business that being an expert on any one takes years of industry experience. While I want to break directly into product marketing, my lack of knowledge and experience is discouraging. Being a sophomore with a bit of runway before I jump into the real world, I thought I would try to figure out WHAT IT TAKES to be a premier product marketing manager and what elite tech companies are looking for in non-tech roles. 

So I did what any other stereotypical business student would do, and I maxed out my commercial search limit on LinkedIn within a day… But seriously, I reached out to people in my network that work/had worked in the Bay area, and cold emailed a ton of people doing business roles there. Most didn’t respond, some were a little nasty, but a good number of them were eager to help. 

In the coming weeks, I’m going to be posting excerpts from the chats I have and the main takeaways I learned from them. Some of them include Square, Twitter, and Airbnb. I’ll also be sharing some great resources and articles for students looking to jump directly into the tech world, but aren’t quite sure where to start. 

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