My name is Connie Gonzalez, and I’m a rising Junior at WashU in the school of Arts and Sciences. I’m studying psychology and marketing with a minor in German, and I’ll be graduating in May 2022. This summer, I’m working at GiftAMeal, an app that gives a meal to someone in need each time that you take a picture of your order at a partner restaurant.

I’ve worked at GiftAMeal for five weeks now. In preparation for this summer, I was part of the St. Louis Entrepreneurship Fellowship in which I was told that as an intern in a startup, I would be tasked with projects ranging across many different areas: marketing, design, administrative tasks, market research, etc. I never imagined the extent to which this was true. I’ve worked on projects that are different from anything I’ve ever done, and I’ve used skills that I never knew I had. Most recently, I worked with another intern to comment on the app and website design of GiftAMeal. I had never done anything like this before, and it made me aware of small details that most of us overlook when looking through an app or website.

One of the big projects that I’ve been working on has been finding promotional materials for GiftAMeal to use in its partner restaurants. These promo materials encourage customers to download the app and take a picture of their meal. This project has been challenging because many restaurants cannot place anything on their tables (because of COVID-19), or they may be closed due to the pandemic. Additionally, it can be very expensive to get promotional materials in all 150+ partner restaurants that GiftAMeal has. Therefore, I’ve tried to overcome these challenges by brainstorming guerilla marketing ideas with the other intern at GiftAMeal. These are creative, very low-cost marketing ideas that can help a company gain more brand recognition. This has been one of my favorite projects to work on so far because I’ve been able to get extremely creative and collaborate with my co-worker to generate crazy and out of the box marketing ideas.  

I’ve kept a journal with all of the information that I’ve learned so far. I have a list of every project that I’ve worked on, and information regarding what it was, how I went about it, and why it was useful. I also write down anything that I find particular about how a normal day at a startup looks. By gathering all of this information, I hope to use this journal in the future when I decide to start my own business.

In June, GiftAMeal donated 14,602 meals to those in need, which is a total of 470,943 meals since it started! GiftAMeal has so much support from the community, from local restaurants, and its users. I’ve loved being part of a startup that creates change in the community by helping those in need.