09 6 / 2011
WePay Journey - Part 3
After I joined WePay as an unpaid intern (see parts 1 & 2 of my WePay journey), I began coming into WePay a few times a week to help out. Although my hours required for my internship program were 10 hours/week, I found myself at WePay HQ more than 30 hours/week.
At first, I was doing facebook ad buys for multiple verticals (primarily fraternities and sororities) with a little bit of support/fraud detection mixed in. It was a great way to get my hands dirty in multiple aspects of a business rather than making copies or building chairs like some other students in my eLab class. I was fairly good at it until I had my first “hot lead.” Another student in the program mentioned that his best friend growing up now ran finances for the Central Pacific Snow Club (still quite possibly the coolest WePay user’s I’ve had the pleasure to work with). These guys were massive in membership (300+), did insane trips (think 100+ people to Whistler) and I had an inside guy. So, I did the only thing I could think of.
I cold called the treasurer.
I learned CPSC was using PayPal and although were down to check out our product, they didn’t necessarily plan on switching anytime soon. Since I had no way of showing them our product (I didn’t have GoToMeeting at the time nor did anyone else at WePay), I lied and said that Rich and I were headed down to SLO that weekend to visit his girlfriend (she lived in LA) and would love to meet up. I immediately turned to Rich told him we were driving to San Luis Obispo that weekend.
We met up on Saturday and they loved the platform. CPSC also happened to be having their biggest party of the year that night so naturally, we opted to stay. Let’s just say it wasn’t one of my better nights. ;)
Ultimately, CPSC became my first “deal” at WePay and spurred me to begin cold calling other ski clubs in the UC system. Within a couple months, about 80% of California College (UC/CSU) ski clubs were using WePay (I’ve still yet to close the elusive UC Santa Cruz ski club since they refuse to respond to my calls/emails).
And the madness began.
