Good morning. Back in my day, Yu-Gi-Oh and Pokémon cards formed the crucial underpinnings of elementary school economies, second only to chocolate milk. The biggest problem that system faced was how scammy all of our trades were. 12 years later, a start-up called ALT has stepped in to clean up the streets with a unique twist on sports trading cards.

Find out how Cole Brown scored an internship with ALT, what he accomplished during his time, and what he thinks you can do to land an internship too.

—Sean Sebers

In today's edition:

🏆 What earned him the role?

📚 The RES.

📊 What he does

📈 Give us more!

Cole Brown

Marketing Intern

Cole grew up in Marin County, CA before attending Elon University in North Carolina. He recently graduated with a bachelor’s degree in marketing, and a minor in finance, and will be starting a digital apprenticeship in New York. Fortunately for us, Cole was able to share his previous experience as a marketing intern for ALT.

ALT is a sports trading card start-up that launched in 2021 with a $31 million round of funding. Their website and app allow anyone to research, buy and sell trading cards from pretty much any sport that has them. As niche as this sounds, the sports trading card market is actually approaching a market size of $1 billion (that’s insane). Whether you’re a hobbyist or hardcore trader, ALT is improving the experience of sports card trading for everyone.

What earned him the role @ALT?

Cole was looking for internships just like the rest of us whenever summer rolls around. He started cold applying through LinkedIn while checking to see if he had any mutual connections at those companies. After around 15-20 applications, one of Cole’s personal friends reached out to him with an awesome opportunity.

He was able to connect Cole with an executive at ALT who then forwarded him to the marketing team. At the time, they happened to be looking for a marketing intern, and Cole happened to be looking for an internship. After an initial conversation/interview to see what kind of a guy he was, they pushed him through to the second round to see if he had the chops for the role.

The interview was more conversational, but they wanted to make sure his background and general experience would work with the position. Cole said that his degree emphasis in digital and analytic marketing gave him credibility during the interview. When all was said and done, Cole secured a fully remote marketing internship with ALT.

📚 The RES.

What a marketing intern @ALT does:

Cole spent his time under the supervision of a main manager, but was encouraged to get involved with other employees’ work to improve skills and help where needed. For the first few weeks, Cole was absorbing as much information as he could to understand ALT’s mission and general operations.

One of the first things he contributed to was time stamping one of ALT’s podcasts so that it could be utilized better for social media content. From then on, he received similar mini-projects from different team members.

Internal Document

The first large project he worked on involved a competitive analysis of ALT’s main industry competitors. Since ALT was working on a new lending service that used sports trading cards as collateral, Cole was tasked with researching how competing lending services operated, and how ALT’s could be better.

Based on what he found, Cole compiled a document with suggestions on how to gain a competitive advantage, and how to provide a better customer experience. He collaborated with ALT’s lending team, card experts, and marketing team to map out the strategies of their competitors. They literally went to different company websites, used their services, and spoke to customer service to find the pros and cons of each system. When finished, the document was used by ALT’s lending team as a guide for building their own lending service.

Brand Analytics

The bulk of Cole’s internship was spent contributing to ALT’s brand redesign by using analytics to gauge its success with customers. Using Google Analytics, Cole tracked the performance of company posts on Twitter, Instagram, and other socials. He also worked with an external ad agency to measure the success of their new branding on advertisements they put out.

Simply put, throughout his internship, he was in charge of keeping up with the likes, comments, shares, etc., of daily posts that ALT released. They compared different types of content like regular single image posts, image carousels, employee testimonials, and many more. With Cole’s help, ALT was able to refine their social media process by posting content more tailored to what their users enjoyed.

📈Give Us More!

💼Want to hear more from Cole?

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

🔍Connect with Cole!

• Connect with him on LinkedIn here.

📢Advice from Cole:

The main thing that I would say is (and you can easily see this online these days when you're applying for a job) that chances are just so slim. If you just apply cold through a company’s application process, you have to try to connect with people within the company as well. Introduce yourself beforehand to hopefully gain a referral and get your foot in the door. If you have to lean on your family connections, then lean on it. Most of the time, people are there to help you.

People love to talk about what they do and will help anyone if they share a connection with them. To give an example, every place that I’m applying to full-time jobs for, I reach out to all the alumni from that company, whether I know them or not, and send a LinkedIn message with just a quick three hundred character message to connect. 90% of the time, since I share that experience with them, they'll respond to help me out. It's been really successful and I've been super grateful to everybody that has helped me out so far in this full-time job search. I'm still, you know, chugging along to get my first first offer here, and hopefully it comes along soon, but it's a long work in progress and I'm just excited for when that day comes. When it does, I’ll know that my internship and the work I've put into the job search will have been worth it. —Cole Brown

*Edited for clarity*