It’s been a little less than 9 months since I started working as a Marketing Coordinator at Tenmiles. And, it has been a very interesting journey so far. My internship commenced early third quarter last year, when I was succumbing to the boredom of my monotonous college routine and was looking for something ‘interesting’ to keep myself involved.

I was doing my final year Bachelors of Computer Science from Loyola College, Chennai when the notice for the position of Marketing Coordinator caught my attention. Words like “Mac”, “Android”, “Food” and “Conversation” in the notice made me curious enough to check out what it was all about.

I applied for the role; the response was immediate with a short casual telephonic round, followed by a personal interview at the Tenmiles office during which my analytical and communication skills were put to test.

Tenmiles follows the startup culture and there’s no dress code, no hierarchy and lots of freedom to do things the way you want to. At Tenmiles, we love creating great products that help make people’s life easier, just like Apple.Another great part of my experience was that I could closely observe and understand the process of building a product right from scratch.

My first project was to expand the customer base for DoAttend across various verticals and geographies. While working on the project, I had the opportunity to learn more about the events industry and how it operates. Later, I was involved in keyword research for other Tenmiles products and later assisted in the marketing of our first iOS app Wonderful Day.

The marketing team is the most happening team in the office filled with a bunch of young and dynamic folks with whom I had the opportunity to work with and have countless memories which we would ever cherish.

At Tenmiles ideas and suggestions are welcome from every quarter. Even the interns get the freedom to voice their opinions. Free exchange of ideas and constructive brainstorming have for sure helped me groom my ideas into more mature ones. Getting a hands-on experience in Internet marketing helped me to better understand the dynamics of selling a product online.

Be it the iOS app Wonderful Day, or the SaaS apps DoAttend and Happyfox; understanding the market positioning of these products was a challenging task. Doing marketing for such great products helped me to understand the process of creating a brand identity all the while beautifying people’s life with smart products.

Thanks to all the challenging tasks I was entrusted with, I have become a better and confident marketer. Interning at Tenmiles is one of the smartest decisions I have taken in my life. It’s been a pleasure being a part of a vibrant company with a diverse set of products. Looking forward to cover more miles with Tenmiles.

Freemium is win-win. However tiny it might be, the customers are happy that they are getting a freebie. Companies get a captive userbase to spread the word, with a great shot at converting them into paying customers over time. Usually, businesses limit the size of the free tier and it doesn’t change over the years.

Initially Dropbox started that way too. Users got free 2GB storage space and 250 MB for each successful referral. It’s wasn’t a groundbreaking idea and they didn’t reinvent the wheel or anything. But overtime, they have added so many accessories to the wheel, it now is capable of powering itself!

Except for maybe mentioning the word Dropbox in a sentence, the company is doling out free space for every reason possible. Refer a friend? Grab 500MB of free space. Tweet about Dropbox? Get 500MB free space.

Follow Dropbox on Twitter? Like it on Facebook? Link it to Twitter? Auto upload images from iPhone? Auto upload from Android phone? You guessed it right, it’s raining free space. Then they hold an annual scavenger hunt online and winners are awarded with, big surprise, more free space!

There are so many ways a user can get free space, Dropbox has a dedicated page to keep track of all the tasks and the respective free space that’s up for grabs. One of the Dropbox competitors offered 50GB of free space for all iOS and Android users who downloaded their mobile app. There wasn’t even a dent in the Dropbox armor.

It’s a simple trick. There is a sense of gratification that accompanies whenever you accomplish something. Instead of dishing out all the rewards upfront, the company keeps customers engaged and pampers them every step of the way.

That isn’t all. Dropbox gets the attention of it’s customers by offering incremental rewards in return for performing simple, but operationally critical chores. For a paltry sum, they’ve successfully crowd sourced product marketing and scalability testing (via image auto uploads).

What Dropbox has mastered in an art – getting the undivided attention of customers. How ingenious is that!

Startup is a fluid concept. Number of years in business or profitability or the number of employees on role hardly count as a criterion anymore for a startup. 37signals is in business since 1999 and they are making money hand over fist. If it weren’t for them, the Rails framework – the engine that’s behind the most popular startups of the day – might not have come into existence. So does the Angry Birds maker Rovio. I could go on.

Pre IPO Groupon employed thousands of people and Facebook had close to a thousand before the public listing too. Currently, there are around 140 people working at Twitter. But the newest cool kid in the block with a billion dollar valuation, Pinterest has only about 30 employees. Clearly, it’s the nature of the business that determines the headcount of the workforce.

Then what defines a startup, you ask? It’s the culture, which again is fluid, changing with the times. The most common customs of which are:

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