One of my new favorite sites is Mixergy.com. It’s kind of like One Day, One Internship for entrepreneurs. Nearly every day, Andrew Warner, the founder, does a video chat/interview with an entrepreneur. It’s a fantastic educational tool for aspiring entrepreneurs, and it’s also a pretty decent job search resource. One of the interviews that I watched recently was with Alex Algard, the founder of White Pages. He tells the story of how he started the Seattle, WA based company as a student with an initial $1,100 investment. White Pages is now a $57 million per year business. What do they do? They help people find people online. How have they made it so profitable? They’ve worked with the right advertisers from the start.
While most Internet companies started prior to 2000 went belly up, White Pages has seen sustained revenue growth for more than a decade. The Mixergy interview gets into the nitty gritty details about why White Pages was successful, but the simple story is they built an extremely useful service and made it free. They monetized by providing relevant advertising that delivered exceptional performance for their advertisers. It may seem surprising that a business like White Pages can continue to grow with Google moving in on its core business, but they keep cranking along. If you’d like to be involved with the business of helping people find people, then you should check out White Pages’ Internships page. They offer some great content on why they’re a fun place to work, and they have quite a few current openings at their office in Seattle, WA. Only one is for an intern: a CSR-Marketing Internship that sounds fantastic because it combines marketing, public relations, and environmental advocacy/public policy. They don’t say whether it’s paid or not, though. I also imagine that if you have strong software development skills, they’d love to have you as an intern.
Links to Help You Begin Your Research
Have you used White Pages?
Do I Know Anyone at White Pages? - Check LinkedIn | Check Facebook
Tags: advertising, advocacy, customer service, Internships, marketing, public policy, public relations, software development, Washington, web development
Thanks for the compliment. I couldn’t respond while I was away last week. Thanks!