Good morning. In a post-Tinder world, dating apps are a dime a dozen. Ego-swiping is killing the industry and causing startups to focus more on community centered apps. Whether you use them or not, social media apps are changing the way we communicate…and the way we use crypto.

Find out how Natalie Benincasa landed an internship with Geojam, an LA-based social media company, and what she does in that role.

—Sean Sebers

In today's edition:

🏆 What earned her the role?

📚 The Res.

📊 What she does

📈 Give us more!

Natalie Benincasa

Social Media Marketing Intern

Natalie is a SoCal native who currently attends CSU Fullerton for her undergraduate degree. She started off as a psychology major but ended up switching halfway through to pursue a bachelor’s in communications with an emphasis in public relations (for reasons we’ll cover later). In her free time, Natalie enjoys watching Netflix with her roommates and conducting market research, aka TikToking.

For around seven months now, Natalie has been working as a social media marketing intern for a company called Geojam. Originally founded in 2019 as a music discovery and social platform, this brand has since pivoted to focus solely on being a social platform. Here’s how it works: prompts are posted by Geojam, your friends, and even celebs in order to start conversations, but you have to answer the prompt in order to see content from others. Geojam also has its own crypto called JAM that is used for in-app community engagement. It’s sort of like if BeReal and TikTok had a kid and then made it more relevant by incorporating crypto.

What earned her the role @Geojam?

Natalie scored her internship with a little luck and a lot of diligence. Let me explain: while taking an entertainment tourism class during her fall 2022 semester, Natalie was assigned a ten page essay on any professional she could think of from the entertainment world. Because her mom works in the travel industry, Natalie was able to ask her if she knew anyone important. Sure enough, Natalie’s mom knew the father of Sarah Figueroa, CEO of Geojam.

At this point nothing was for certain. In fact, Natalie was told that there was probably a low chance of speaking to Sarah since she was busy running a company. Reaching out anyways, Natalie asked if she could interview her for a school project. Instead of turning her down, Sarah accepted the offer and invited Natalie to the Geojam HQ in LA.

After the interview, Natalie spoke with an assistant who happened to handle new hires at Geojam. They were only supposed to chat about a college ambassador position, but Natalie made such a good impression that she was offered an internship on the spot.

This internship didn’t just fall into her lap, though. Natalie leveraged a family connection, pursued a literal CEO despite being told it probably wouldn’t work out, and managed to show off her love for social media through conversation. And sure, the opportunity wouldn’t have existed without a little family help, but it also wouldn't have existed without Natalie’s continuous effort and genuine interest in social media.

Change in pace

Prior to her internship with Geojam, Natalie was an intern for a pediatric clinic in SoCal. She was originally pursuing a degree in communicative sciences and disorders for speech pathology, so clinical hours were a must.

As it turns out, Natalie started to enjoy the administrative office work more than the speech pathology related tasks at the clinic. She realized that speech pathology as a study was not the same as speech pathology in practice.

She cut ties with communicative science and shifted her focus towards marketing related roles—a decision that would set the stage for her epic internship with Geojam.

📚 The Res.

What a social media marketing intern @Geojam does:

For the first month or so, Natalie spent time learning about the company, attending meetings, and contributing to projects when she could. She quickly understood the ins and outs of the company which allowed her to start working more directly on marketing strategy.

Smaller companies tend to have more opportunities for interns to try things out, and Geojam is no exception. Here’s a few things Natalie has done so far:

• Help product test their new app and give Geojam engineers ideas for how the user experience could be improved

• Created focus groups to collect user data and app feedback

• Created TikToks and other advertisements

• Facilitated an influencer confessional booth

Focus Groups

Before the Geojam app launched, Natalie was working on creating and running focus groups. She started from scratch by reaching out to college friends and asking if they’d be interested in learning about and giving feedback on a new app. Natalie would host them at her apartment, give a presentation, ask them lot’s of questions, and record their ideas/suggestions.

A second focus group ended up being created later, this time with college students in Alabama. One of Natalie’s fellow interns happened to be from Alabama, so that allowed them to connect with a totally different demographic.

TikToks & Ads

Back in 2022, Natalie and the Geojam team were brainstorming how to promote their app for Christmas. Natalie proposed that a “25 days of TikTok LIVE with Nick Antonia”, aka Jonah from David Dobriks’ vlogs, would be a hit. The team loved the idea, and somehow Geojam’s CEO knew Nick from college. Basically, the idea was meant to be.

According to Natalie, the idea was similar to the 2016 movie Nerve that features a high stakes game of truth or dare. Geojam users could spend JAM tokens on dares that Nick would perform while on TikTok LIVE. The content pulled in tons of viewers and generated significant traffic on their TikTok channel.

Beyond ideating a successful TikTok LIVE campaign, Natalie has contributed to a fair share of TikTok, Instagram, and sponsored advertisements for the company. Comparing Nerve to Geojam’s app was actually an advertisement idea that she fleshed out on her own.

Influencer Confessional Booth

Geojam hosted Tana Mongeau’s Dizzy Wine launch party, and sent Natalie on an important mission: running the confessional booth. In a crowd of influencers and celebrities, Natalie had to avoid becoming starstruck while encouraging attendees to come into the confessional. Just like on a reality TV show, Natalie would get them to download Geojam and create content on the app before they left the booth. It was definitely an internship high.

Coachella

Speaking of internship high’s, Natalie was recently flown out to Coachella for content creation purposes. Geojam partnered with LA Weekly to host some pretty epic desert parties, all of which are detailed here.

If you’re interested in learning more from or connecting with Natalie, feel free to reach out through her LinkedIn below!

📈Give Us More!

💼Want to hear more from Natalie?

• Watch the full interview on our YouTube channel linked here.

🔍Connect with Natalie!

• Connect with her on LinkedIn here.

📢Advice from Natalie:

I would say, just put yourself out there—at least that's what I did. That's how I’ve gotten all my internships. The internship I have right now was from putting myself out of my comfort zone.

Two years ago, I was honestly so lazy—I thought that everything would just come to me. I thought everything was just going to fall into place. I always told myself that, but it's actually so easy to put yourself out there. Even just going on LinkedIn, and even you [Sean] just reached out to me on LinkedIn, and now we're doing an interview. It's just reaching out to people no matter how scared you are, because you never know what could happen.

Everybody else is going to send in applications, so how are you going to make yourself different from everybody else? Everyone likes social media, everyone likes the marketing aspects of it, it's a super fun job, of course it is, but there's different characteristics you need as well in order to do those jobs. Really learn how to talk to people, I think that's the main thing. —Natalie Benincasa

*Edited for clarity*