For those who have never worked at a small, early-stage company — but are thinking about looking for Boston startup jobs — there are a lot of questions. In fact, the whole idea of working at a startup is largely a mystery to anyone who hasn’t actually done so. Are the hours long? Do the founders micro-manage your every move? What the hell does a software engineer do, anyway? Because while “Silicon Valley” may offer a few truisms, it’s a satirical TV show based on the West Coast.
So we’re tearing down the curtain. HourlyNerd, the Harvard Business School offshoot that’s shaking up the world of business consulting, gave me the opportunity to spend a day in their office, shadowing employees from a range of departments. While I write about VC-backed tech startups every day, I had only a very vague idea of what an employee’s day-to-day experience at one looks like.
And HourlyNerd is an ideal subject for such a piece: The company, whose investors include Mark Cuban, is growing rapidly. The founders tell me that they had about a dozen people working in their old office on Bromfield Street — but in their new space on Kingston Street, which they moved into just under a year ago, there are now about 40 employees. In February, HourlyNerd closed a $7.8 million Series B funding round, and now, more than 10,000 consultants are featured on the site, while more than 4,500 companies using the service — including Microsoft, GE and American Apparel.
Here’s what I learned during my day at HourlyNerd.
The office
Like many startups, HourlyNerd has an open layout to encourage collaboration. There’s a LeanBox for healthy snack attacks, a ping pong table in the back and the fridge is always stocked with beer.
But make no mistake: The HourlyNerd staff works hard. And because of that, they make it a point to celebrate any and all wins, whether big or small. Mid-morning, I hear the bell ring three times — and an employee tells me it dings for every $1,000 made on a sale.
Working at a fast-growing startup comes with inherent risks—and also great rewards.
They hold group lunches on Friday, and invite people from the startup community to come over later in the day for a few brews and some pizza. There’s an after-work basketball league, and a dining group that checks out a new restaurant every month. This spring, they had a March Madness viewing party, in February they celebrated a Series B funding and their 2nd birthday with a skiing trip, and last summer they all went on a boat cruise. In October, staff participated in the Nerd Olympics — with a slew of events including obscure trivia, quick math challenges. Of course, everyone donned their goofiest glasses and nerd T-shirts.
Side note — employees tell me that co-founder and CEO Patrick Petitti has a penchant for playing pranks. Perfect example: He spread fake mouse droppings on a product manager’s desk because he has a habit of leaving food around.
If I took anything away from my talks with employees, it's this: Working at a fast-growing startup comes with inherent risks, uncertainties and unique obstacles, and it requires an individual who is easily adaptable. But with great risks comes great rewards.
While spending some one-on-one time with a handful of team members, I got to delve into the specific requirements of each department and role.
Lucy Minott: Manager, Product Management
Before coming to HourlyNerd, Minott was planning to go to MIT Sloan School of Management for her MBA. She had been working in management at Endeavor, an organization that advises startups/entrepreneurs, and in doing so, became interested in working for such a size/stage company herself. So she reached out to co-founder/CEO Rob Biederman, who she knew from her undergrad experience at Princeton, and gave a hard pitch for why her skill set was suited to HourlyNerd. And just like that, she joined the product team, which was a big focus at the time she was hired.
Now, Minott has been here for one year. And the realm of product management and strategy is a perfect fit for her because, as a results-driven person, she’s able to see the impact of her number crunching each week.
This is Minott’s first time working at a startup, and she says it’s a lot more organized that she expected it to be.
“The motivation is very genuine, whether it’s because people know the company is so early stage and they could help grow it, or it could mean a lot for their career down the line, or they just really believe in the idea — you don’t get people doing BS work,” she said. “With startups, you sort of have to add value day one.”
Her work:
Minott gets to the office between 8:30 and 9 a.m., because that’s before the engineering team rolls in but after sales has already arrived. Her day is divided into three different areas: planning for software product that are launching weeks or months in the future, dealing with support tickets for Enterprise Product Management and analytics.
At the beginning of every quarter, a roadmap is devised for her team in terms of what they want to accomplish, with very clear metrics. Based on that, Minott says she has to prioritize which features to focus on that will get “the most bang for your buck” in reaching those goals. She then holds meetings with the relevant stakeholder — usually the sales team — to find out what the pain points are in X process for onboarding enterprise clients. Then it’s time to come up with a general workflow that could solve those challenges, and get people’s feedback on that. Minott works with a designer on usability to determine what should be on each screen.
"You don’t get people doing BS work. With startups, you sort of have to add value day one."
She also spends time in Unfuddle dealing with tickets for Enterprise Product Management — reading feedback from users. Once she finds criteria for a specific feature that could be beneficial, she'll sit down with a developer to explain the goal.
HourlyNerd uses MixPanel and Google Analytics, but they also have their own database with reports. She has an Excel doc in which she keeps track of all the features devs are supposed to be building — which is crucial because those will help get her closer to the OKRs that were set at the beginning of the quarter.
“If a new feature is working, I ask myself: how can we elaborate on that?” she explained. “And if trends show that the feature may be hurting conversion, we maybe scrap it or go back to the drawing board.”
Right now, she’s working on a separate site specifically for enterprise clients — fine-tuning what the user dashboard look like and adding a specific call-to-action that might inspire higher-ups to share the page with other people internally.
Minott says her favorite part of the job is the weekly internal product team meetings. At these brainstorming sessions, team members will detail the things they’re working on and ask a question about one thing they’re stuck on to get feedback.
“There’s so much storytelling that goes into product management — getting people to buy into what you’re doing,” she added. “I used to think it was all about hitting numbers.”
She typically leaves the office between 6 and 7 p.m.
Devon Petersmeyer Johnson: Director, Marketing
After attending Harvard Business School, Johnson worked in brand management at P&G — specifically on Gillette Venus.
Johnson says that deep down, she always knew that her stint with a massive multinational company would be short-lived — and eventually, she aimed to end up at a smaller company, where she could bring all the knowledge she soaked up at P&G to the table and help it grow.
When Biederman connected with her over LinkedIn, the two set a date to grab coffee. Johnson had heard about HourlyNerd through the HBS alumni network, and thought it was a really smart concept. Coffee turned into three hours of conversations with the rest of the leadership team: Johnson was already bouncing ideas off of them, and exploring their challenges HourlyNerd faces. She says she could tell instantly that it was a very collaborative environment. She didn’t have her resume on her, or do much research on the company, because she didn’t realize it would turn into an interview. But they happened to be looking for a marketing manager, and it was immediately obvious she was the perfect candidate for the role. She's been working at HourlyNerd for just two months now.
“I think with any startup it’s a lot about the business idea, but more than that — it’s about the people," Johnson said. "Walking out of that meeting I was already kind of sold.”
Biederman told me that there's a key reason why they were keen to hire Johnson: She has a strong understanding of both the suppliers and the buyers, as well as the industry they're trying to disrupt.
Her work:
Johnson arrives every day at 8:30 a.m. and leaves at 5 p.m. sharp to spend time with her 9-month-old son. Luckily, it’s been easy for her to set those boundaries, because HourlyNerd is ultra-flexible and accommodating to the fact that she has a family life to uphold. While she often logs on for a short time after her son has gone to sleep, she never expects her team members to do the same.
“People here work incredibly hard, but they have a really good time doing it,” she said.
Johnson admits that she would have expected the founders to be a little more controlling over every aspect of the business — as is the stereotype with entrepreneurs. That’s probably the thing that surprised her most, given that this is her first time working at a startup.
In the morning, Johnson is typically catching up on email and meeting with her three team members. One person is focused on paid acquisitions (what campaigns should we be doing that we haven’t thought of yet?), another person is focused on inbound marketing (which webinars, ebooks, blog and social media, tactics are driving engagement?) and another is focused on partnerships (what other businesses with similar target markets can HourlyNerd work with to provide more value?)
"At a startup you're constantly asking yourself: how do you build a foundation while trying to grow the business as fast as you can?"
“The thing about our business is — there’s no business like it yet,” she said. “We’re disrupting an industry that’s been around forever. So there is no handbook for how to speak to consumers.”
That means her division has to do a lot of testing to learn what messages are most appealing.
Johnson also holds regular meetings with sales and client strategy employees to talk about broader strategic issues for the company — and with the product team to figure out where marketing needs to weigh in on customer-facing pieces.
The best part of her job? That everything is immediately measurable.
“It’s so exciting and energizing to see the real-time impact of what we’re doing,” she told me. “You can try something and within a day understand if it’s working or not.”
But there's one challenge she's constantly grappling with.
"At a startup you're constantly asking yourself: how do you build a foundation while trying to grow the business as fast as you can? It comes down to not always focusing too much on revenue generation, and monthly targets — but often on less measurable things, like creating a stable foundation for going forward. It’s all about finding that balance.”
Ben Zlotoff: VP, Client Strategy
How he got the job:
After studying engineering at Brown, Zlotoff attended HBS with the HourlyNerd founders, so he was well aware of the company. However, he started his career at Bain & Company – and had every intention of staying there for the foreseeable future. That is, until he did a summer internship at HourlyNerd, and decided he wasn’t ready to leave the startup.
So he stuck around. At the time, there were only 10 employees, so he didn’t have a real title – but he did have a significant stake in the company. Soon, he had a legitimate role and function within HourlyNerd.
His work:
Every day, Zlotoff arrives around 8 a.m.
“For anyone client-facing, you need to be at your best from 9:30 to 4 for calls and emails,” he said.
On any given day, he’ll have contact with roughly 100 clients, and he interacts with about 50 unique clients each week by phone or email. There are six people on the client strategy team — mostly former consultants — to distribute the work amongst.
The majority of his work involves scoping clients’ projects and matching them with the right consultant, mainly for VC funds, capital funds other enterprise clients. Whereas in a business like Uber or Kayak the data is objective, Zlotoff says the consulting business demands more customization. The matching — which in the aforementioned companies would be done by an algorithm – has to be done by human beings at HourlyNerd.
His day breaks down into three main functions. One is very sales oriented, one is working with the talent ("nerds") and the other is internal meetings, typically with the product team about rollouts of new features, ideas, bugs that need to be worked out. Thus far, HourlyNerd has been oversupplied on talent, so Zlotoff noted that they’re focused on driving the demand side. That doesn't mean that attracting and developing the "nerds" isn't still a priority.
"What’s compelling about working at a startup is your impact is extremely measurable, and tangible, and rapid. You close a big sale and everyone knows about it."
Zlotoff is typically in the office until 7 or 8 p.m. But working directly with clients — and seeing the outcome — is rewarding enough to make his hard work well worth it.
“What’s compelling about working at a startup is your impact is extremely measurable, and tangible, and rapid,” he told me. “You close a big sale and everyone knows about it.”
While Zlotoff has worked at several startups and even co-founded one, he didn’t ever see himself in sales — and he’s continually surprised by how much he enjoys it.
“That’s one advantage,” he said. “At most late stage, established companies, you don’t get the chance to do client-facing selling work until you’re very senior — 10 or 15 years into your career.”
In this role, he’s been able to hone his client communications and soft influence skills right away.
“We’re in chapter three right now at HourlyNerd,” he told me, “deliberate, thoughtful growth, and targeting the right people with the right message while honing the product.”
His biggest challenge echoes Johnson's: Continually re-prioritizing short-term and long-term endeavors.
“Every month we want to grow ideally at least 20 percent,” he said. “So with the marginal hour, we have to decide: should I spend the next hour on this project for this quarter, or setting up the company for success in the next five years?”
Angie Malerba: Associate, Sales
How she got the job:
Here's a somewhat surprising fact: Malerba had no sales or consulting experience before joining HourlyNerd. After attending Holy Cross, she worked for a small downtown PR agency for six years where a lot of her clients were startups at varying stages. When she found out the agency was shutting down, Malerba began her job search, and came across a business development opportunity at HourlyNerd on AngelList. She had a strong feeling that PR skills, especially in regards to prospecting, would be naturally transferrable to a sales role.
After a phone interview and face-to-face meeting with the founders over drinks, she was hired last November.
Her work:
Malerba, who works with two other business development associates, gets to the office around 8:30 a.m. But on the bus from Southie, she likes to get a jump-start on figuring out a plan of attack for the day by checking emails.
Once she arrives, she’ll have a morning sync up with sales team, where they all talk about one goal they hope to accomplish — from reaching out to a new account to closing one. From there, Malerba’s researching prospective clients to go after. How does she go about sourcing? A lot of digging in SEC filings and, of course, LinkedIn.
Malerba says since the day is steadily busy, time flies. She’ll typically jet out of the office between 6:30 and 7 p.m.
Since joining the company last fall, Malerba has had the opportunity to interview a lot of sales associates, and HourlyNerd is just about to bring on three new people in her role.
“Only one of them has a sales background,” Malerba told me. “Everything else can be learned in training. We’re just looking for people who are eager to learn, passionate and well-spoken.”
Rick Keilty: Senior Software Engineer, Technology
For Keilty, there came a time when it was abundantly clear he needed a change to experience any further professional growth. After attending Cornell and then getting his master’s at Northeastern, he worked at Vistaprint in various roles for more than six years. Keilty knew that at a startup, he would have the chance to experiment and be more nimble overall, because there’s a greater level of trust.
When HourlyNerd CTO Brian Morgan reached out to him via LinkedIn, they realized a random connection: Morgan’s first job out of college had been working for Keilty’s dad. He interviewed and — just like that — landed a leadership position on the engineering team in October.
Keilty has since been actively involved in the hiring process for other engineers and interns, and he says the process at HourlyNerd is atypical for several reasons. For one, it’s often done in phases — a few emails back and forth, grabbing coffee, meeting them team and then getting to know them further over dinner. Of course, part of the evaluation is working through a few coding problems on the board. But overall, Keilty stressed that it’s pretty informal.
His work:
Like the majority of HourlyNerd’s other engineers, Keilty typically rolls into the office around 9:30 a.m.
And he basically dove right into dev work in his first week. In fact, by day two of the job, he had code being pushed out to customers. The best part? By day three, he was already seeing differences in how people were moving around the site as a result of his work.
At Vistaprint, Keilty was developing detection software for the payment and fraud analytics team. And the work carries over to his current job: The algorithms that he was developing to determine what is and isn’t fraud in real-time (as in, milliseconds) are very similar to what he is building to optimize HourlyNerd’s matching system. Keilty explained to me that it used to be up to the businesses to find talent to fit their needs, and up to the talent to find projects that demanded their skills. Now, it’s all about figuring out — based on the data they have on those businesses and the skills of the "nerds" — which are a good fit and do that connecting for them. But it’s tricky with on-demand consulting, especially with thousands of businesses coming in.
"You have to be able to adapt, and pivot in different ways at a startup, or it will be difficult to be effective."
“You have to be able to adapt, and pivot in different ways at a startup, or it will be difficult to be effective,” he told me.
Keilty says things are moving incredibly fast on the engineers’ side at HourlyNerd. Right now, they’re continually tweaking the front-facing website so that it’s more appealing to SMBs and prospective enterprise clients, and has a distinctly different look and feel from that of a standard consulting agency. They also often have to walk clients through posting a project.
“One of the things I like about the size of our team and our startup is everyone knows a little but about every other piece of the system,” said Keilty. “Everyone has a stake in every other piece, too, and it allows everyone to learn new skills and test out their existing skills in new ways.”
Keilty usually leaves the office between 5:30 and 6:30 p.m, and emphasized that the startup strongly values work-life balance.
“They hire the best, and give you the freedom to let you do whatever you do best,” he added.
Sometimes, Keilty continues working a little more when he gets home, but he was adamant that it’s not an expectation — it’s because he has faith in the future of the company and enjoys seeing results from the problems he’s working on.
Photo of founders via HourlyNerd. All other images courtesy of creative director Josh Sims.
