First Job in Tech

It's just been a really busy day. It's been a good day. I feel like I've gotten a lot done, but between getting Kanan back and forth, getting ready to go pick him up in about 15 20 minutes now. I did 2 workshops. I had an hour-long meeting with the success team, had a meeting with Nathan, our founder. I had 3 calls with customers and did some tickets, wrote a couple of emails, wrote a post. So just— I mean, I feel like I got a lot out of the day, but the day has just been a dead sprint since, since we started. And Kaden woke up super early. He woke up at 6:15 instead of his usual 7:15, so been getting after it today. Going to get Kanan, uh, later, later than I wanted to, but is what it is. And kind of struggling the last few days on and off with getting the vlog out. I'm really enjoying it, but just I'm hitting a bit of a hump, and I know this is kind of a good sign actually that I'm still interested. I'm hitting a hump. I'm still shipping, but it's tough, and I don't really know if I'm providing you a lot of value. I'm just shipping, but that's good. Like, I haven't done that in a while on a personal project, so thanks for joining me on it. So he's asleep, and you may think, Matt, you're breaking one of the cardinal rules of parenting, which is why would you ever try and wake a sleeping baby? I'm not trying to wake him, but it is, it is 5:50, and I don't want him napping. And so I'm fine. I might have to kind of break this off a little bit if he does suddenly wake up, but normally when he's asleep like this and he didn't take a nap earlier, like, he's gone. So I can probably get through 5-7 minutes of this, and then I'm just gonna wake him up anyway. So Apologies if I have to kind of cut this short. I had a meeting with a friend yesterday who was asking me, you know, Matt, you know, how'd you get into tech for the first time and what were some of the steps? I've talked to my brother some about this, so I wanted to do a video about it and talk with you. There's a few steps that I can recommend. One is just be aware that it's probably going to take a little bit of time. Like, it took me 2 years of consistent interviewing, getting really close. Like, I was a finalist on 3 or 4 different jobs. And really thought I was going to get a couple of them. One in particular, when I didn't get it, like, I was really devastated. But I love where I'm at now with ConvertKit. So a couple of, a couple of tips. The biggest thing that you can do is already be making things. And when I say making things, I mean make sure that you're blogging, that you're vlogging, that you are something more than just like updating your social media profiles. Okay? Because people that are going to be interviewing you, they don't just want to see you interacting. That's important, but they also want to see that you're capable of building something, of following through on a project, even if it's a project that you've put together yourself. So be putting things together online and be putting content out, be talking about your process. And I think this is something that gets missed a lot. Like, people just want to write. I was like this for a long time. Something I've really learned well being at ConvertKit. Sean McCabe does an amazing job with this. Of course, Nathan does. Gary Vee talks about this a lot. He, he talks about in some of his videos you know, don't worry about being creative, just worry about being a documentarian. Is that the right term? Hope. And so that's something that's really important. That's something that I would definitely encourage you on. The next thing that I think is really important is to look at the types of jobs that you're interested in having and start to really get specific. When I interviewed with Buffer back in 2013, it also happened at Help Scout a couple of years after that, was I applied for two different jobs at the same company and it was really unclear to them like what I really wanted to focus on. And you may think as I did like, oh, I'm diversifying my opportunities. And I can tell you from experience, most recruiters don't see it that way. They just think, they just think that, oh, this person just wants to get a foothold, which is true. That's, that's really all I wanted to do was just, you know, get in somewhere doing something. So be really specific, start to build your skills around a particular thing that you want to do. And I think there are 3 or 4 different areas that you can concentrate your time on depending on your background. One is in any kind of technical expertise, you know, whether that's coding, you know, some type of engineering or design, something that requires technical chops. That's a really great place to be because you can— it's usually easier to add soft skills. I had a video about this a few days ago. It's usually easier to add soft skills after the fact. It's more time-consuming and more difficult to add technical skills later on, which is what I'm trying to do right now and one of my focuses for this year. Maybe it's "fo-kai." I don't know. So concentrate on a specific track and and start to build those skills. And again, document them, share them, show how you're going through this thing or that. The other thing that I would try and do, and I was actually working on this before I got hired at ConvertKit, was see if you can create an expertise or a little bit of freelance opportunity around something specific that will help a company that you want to work with or are interested in working with. And that'll do two things. Like here, you can totally steal this if you, if you want to do this. One of the things that I, what I was concentrating on when I got hired at ConvertKit was that I had been doing a lot of KB videos for some different companies, mostly at SumoMe, now Sumo.com. And what I was going to do was find growing startups. This was my niche. I was gonna find startups that were growing that had knowledge bases, so their help articles, that didn't have that many or any videos behind their content. It was just written, because a lot of times, especially with software products, people like to have, people like to have like a video walkthrough. So my contract pitch to them was gonna be like, you know, hey, I noticed that you have all these videos and people are probably looking at them. Would you like to hire me? You know, this is my expertise to create KB videos for your articles. So if you want to steal that, please go ahead. And that did— that would do two things. One, it would give me— it'd give me a portfolio, it would give me specific apps and experience to work on, and it would start to build my network. So just build things, make things. Meet as many people as you can. I think something great that you can do is go to conferences. I know they're kind of expensive, or can be, but find one or some in your area that you can go connect with. Another thing that you can do to get your first, to get your first job in tech is just to apply to a bunch. There's really no other way to get in front, you know, in addition to the things that I've already talked about. When it comes to actually interviewing, I'm still in touch with the people that interviewed me, and so it's still a good network builder. But in review, because I'm about to wake up Kanan, which is always fun to wake up a child. I have some milk ready to go, don't worry. If you want to start moving to get your— oh, here's one other thing. I told Mark this. Mark's my brother, and he was kind of looking at this in the past. And he's more in like a sales, sales type position. So this is the advice that I gave him, and you can kind of restructure it based on a thing that you're interested in doing. If you want to get into sales marketing, this is what I told Mark. If you want to get into a tech company who's working on as a sales representative, what you should do is try and learn as much as you can about their current sales strategy. You can also go like onto their website, any kind of outbound or inbound marketing channel that you find. For them, research that, look for the places that they might be missing something, and write up a really lengthy report on it to share. Like, this is what I saw, this is what I think you could be doing better, this is what— of course you don't have access to their data or their metrics or anything like that, but just for the— what you're really sharing with them is your ability to break something down, your ability to find holes, your ability to think differently about a situation and put a plan together. This was something that I've— advice that I was given by Ryan Delk, who's at BeOmni. And Delk did this really, really well when he was coming up, when he was coming up in tech. I don't know, when he was like 12 years old. I'm kidding. He's just super young and incredibly smart. Not super young, younger than me, and really smart. But that's what I do. Another great example of this is Samuel Halik. I can't pronounce your name. Of useronboard.com. And what Samuel does is that he goes on to sites and he goes on to sites and apps and he goes through their initial onboarding experience and he does this, you know, long slide deck of like feedback and like, oh, I noticed this. I wonder what's happening here. This is really good. And then, like, he is now an onboarding— he's an onboarding specialist. That's what he does. Like, he's just, like, he's just a consultant now. But he could have got— I bet he could have gotten hired at any number of the nearly 100 companies and apps that he's done onboarding reviews for. So you could totally copy that strategy. So in review, thanks for watching this. Props to Kanan for falling, for falling asleep and staying asleep. Interview, if you want to look at getting your first job in tech, what I would concentrate on is building up your skills in the particular niche or focus of job that you want to be in. I would focus on a particular niche that you want to be in. Okay, so build those skills and also build them towards a particular thing, even if it's scary to think like, oh well, I could be a writer, I could be a marketer, I could be a content producer, I could work in customer service. Like, these are all thoughts that I had. It would have been much better for me and even if it took a little bit longer, because it ends up— it ended up taking a while anyway for me. It would have been much better for me to just say like I wanted to be in customer experience. Okay, um, and the other part is go to conferences, build your network as best you can just by providing value and connecting, document and share all of your processes, all the things that you're putting together. The last part, the that I just talked about is go through the different companies or roles that you're interested in applying for and break them down. Look for the holes. Think about how would I do this differently, or what kind of questions do I have? Like, if you could literally ask yourself the questions— something I proposed to Mark— if you were to build a sales strategy around this particular product, what would that look like? Even if you think it's kind of silly, write it out, document it, share your, share your ideas behind it. And again, put all that on a blog, put all of that on a vlog. Don't just update it on Twitter or like put it on Facebook or Instagram or whatever. Like, those are all good, but you need to have a share, a single hub where you can share more longer-form content that you can gather around a central idea. So hope that was helpful. I'm going to be posting this on YouTube also. Just go to youtube.com and course.com and search for Matt Ragland and click on the channel that looks like me, not on the Matt Ragland that does not look like me because that is not me, and subscribe to those videos. I'm going to keep doing this on Facebook also. Thanks for watching whether here or there, and I enjoy doing these. Thanks so much, and again, props to Kanan. He's very cute and he's very sleepy. All right everyone, peace, have a good night, bye.