Alisha, Mehndiratta

Internship Description

Alisha Mehndiratta ’20 interned with Cowrywise, a fintech platform in Nigeria that empowers people to save and invest their money in a simple and flexible way. She focused on strategizing, optimizing, and executing digital marketing campaigns to more effectively connect with potential and existing users.

I worked on several initiatives throughout the course of my internship. My first goal was to optimize search engine optimizaion (SEO). I went through the meta descriptions and title tags that were attached to all Cowrywise webpages, and rewrote them to optimize keywords and messaging. While it takes close to a year to really see the results of these changes on engagement metrics like clicks and conversions, the team agrees that the new wording is more compelling and accurate in conveying the company’s value proposition. I also looked at the Google AdWords and Analytics platforms and noticed that Cowrywise’s diversity of keywords was not that strong; they were showing up for wealth management-related keywords, but not life goal-related keywords. For example, the company’s mission is to help people plan for big events like a new baby, a wedding, vacation, or retirement, but it wasn’t showing up in Google search results if anyone was searching for those things. To fix this, I wrote copy for several new landing pages for the website, each dedicated to a key life goal. This was a great learning process for me because I had to do a lot of research to determine best practices when designing new webpages and optimizing engagement. The team is currently in the process of working on design and bringing the copy I wrote to life. I also worked on SEO optimization for both Android and iOS app stores, and helped create a Wikipedia page for Cowrywise. Finally, the most interesting project I took the lead on was designing and implementing an email campaign specifically targeting new users who have made an account but not created a saving or investment plan. I wanted to use a testimonial-based strategy, because I felt that success stories from other real users could be the most compelling reason to convince someone to actually make a plan of their own. I worked with the team to collect strong stories from existing users, wrote copy for multiple emails to be used in the campaign, and used the customer.io platform to create a multi-month long chain of events that will hopefully drive more potential customers to become active users. I have been monitoring the metrics on the campaign since it launched, and while there is no meaningful improvement compared to the old campaign yet, we are hopeful that this is a matter of volume and we will see improvement over time.

I took on a lot of different initiatives over the summer and had the freedom to design my own workstreams and priorities. I think the ability to look at a company or a product, assess its strengths and weaknesses, and determine what the most essential needs are is a skill I really honed during my MBA, through various management classes and experiences working on ambiguous problems with diverse teams. In addition, particularly because the internship was remote, I needed to put in extra effort to get to know various members of the team and ensure I had the resources I needed to actually execute on my various projects. I think I did a good job developing positive relationships with colleagues on multiple teams, from design to dontent to product, and building buy-in to the initiatives I was working on. This is another soft skill that I believe is necessary to succeed in many post-MBA managerial roles, and one I developed by participating in so many different group projects and leadership opportunities at CBS.

One of the main challenges I faced was the resource constraints of a small startup when trying to execute on some of my ideas. Sometimes, there would be a lot of enthusiasm towards an initiative, but the company was just not in the right place from a technology or personnel standpoint. For example, I pitched building strong B2B partnerships with other tech startups in Nigeria and integrating Cowrywise products with other products that could have a symbiotic, mutually beneficial relationship for customers. The team loved the idea, but had to bench it for the future, when they are able to build individual application programming interfaces (APIs) for their products. To work around this for now, I proposed lower-effort marketing campaigns that Cowrywise could launch with potential B2B partners that would simply be focused on messaging and advertising, not tech product integration. While it was challenging to be unable to implement the best ideas we had sometimes, figuring out creative solutions to achieve similar results was also a helpful experience that I’m sure will come in handy in future roles as well.

Overall, I believe this internship has been a very meaningful and productive way to spend my summer, and I have thoroughly enjoyed working with the Cowrywise team. The entire team — including Razaq, the CEO — was responsive almost 24/7 and always willing to provide support and guidance whenever needed. At the same time, they gave me an incredible amount of autonomy to determine how to spend my time and what to work on, which I really appreciated as an MBA graduate looking forward to more leadership and management roles in the future. For example, one initiative was exploring potential B2B partnerships to expand marketing reach. This was an idea that I came up with as I was brainstorming ways to grow awareness, but did not fall within the purview of the initial internship guidelines. Nevertheless, Razaq was excited to hear my ideas, encouraged me to dig deeper, and is now asking the rest of the team to work with me on pushing some of my work forward. This internship has confirmed my interest in the marketing and consumer space, and also helped me overcome some of my initial hesitations about joining a new and small startup full-time due to lack of structure. I believe the passion of the team and ability to take risks and work autonomously make working at a startup like Cowrywise very exciting and a unique learning experience. I would encourage any potential intern considering the opportunity to work at Cowrywise or a similar fintech startup to definitely take it, because I really believe learning how to be productive and thrive in an unstructured environment where all team members wear all hats is an important skill that will be valued in any work environment in the future.