1. Data Analysis with Paperfold: A New, Exciting London Startup Carl Stanley carl132_Stanley@Hotmail.com What is Paperfold? Paperfold is your email reimagined. It is a new, more visual look at your inbox, and it’s available now on iPad. The app itself turns your inbox into a tile view, to give you more of your emails at a glance; see attachments right from the inbox, and interact with your emails in a more simple way. Email shouldn’t feel like work anymore, and at Paperfold, it doesn’t. Email has become a beautiful experience, made intuitive and co operative. At the time of me joining the company, it was made up of 3 members: the CEO; the programmer; and the creative designer. It was my job to analyse the data produced by the audience of the app, and improve the traffic flowing toward 3 main areas. There were the app itself, the website for the app, and the emails that the audience received. How did I fit into the company? During my time at Paperfold, I was given 2 main tasks: 1: Market research and Digital Advertising Paperfold is currently competing with many, many other email apps for the iPad, and so it needs to be able to stand out above the rest. It was my job to: -Use social media to create advertising campaigns that would spread the word about the new app, and show the potential audience what we have to offer. -Create an email campaign, split into different engagement groups and different geographical demographics, to advertise new features and keep the current audience informed about the app and it’s progress. -Monitor the app’s traffic over the website, the social media coverage, and the app itself, to devise a future strategy for increasing the traffic accordingly. And in completing these tasks efficiently, I was able to increase the traffic by around 400% from before my arrival, as shown below: 2: Using HTML & CSS to code surveys In doing this, I would be able to gather feedback from my work in the social media advertising area of my task on a much larger scale, enabling me to foresee the outcome of future campaigns, therefore reducing costs of advertising and ultimately saving the company money. The Problem I had to solve over my internship using this task: When I first arrived at Paperfold, the whole area of digital advertising was relatively new, and so no one in the company had too much experience with the platforms that I would be using. This meant Teaching myself how to use a variety of platforms to look at the app from a lot of different angles, and try to use all of the information to formulate campaigns to improve numbers. Once I started to use digital advertising, the cost became immediately apparent, and so I turned to surveys. This was a huge advantage, as I was confident in programming with the language, and it enabled the campaign to reach up to 200 people in a matter of hours, giving me a lot more time to work on valuable targeting, which is essentially where all of the savings came from. This also greatly sped up the rate of which I produced advertising campaigns and, more importantly, increased the rate of new campaigns that addressed different questions and therefore provided more useful information. The data shows the app opens over my time at Paperfold, and during the first month (half of the graph) I was using the advertising to do preliminary research on the audience. However in the second half, I started using the results to target the advertising, and the engagement rates immediately increased. This followed by a couple of dips due to more research, but ultimately the figures increased by around 400%. The next test was to see how efficiently this was done. This was investigated through looking at the spend per day/week, and comparing it to the engagements over the same period of time. There was a direct inverse correlation between these two factors, which was very positive for me, as it showed my work was directly impacting the traffic for the app, and this was amazing. The graphs to illustrate this are shown to the right: What I gained/Learned From the Placement Over this period I’ve gained a lot of valuable experience, and met a lot of interesting and unique people. When I arrived I was faced with a task that was very open ended, and also a task that no one in the company actually knew how to tackle, and therefore no one could guide me. These two aspects of the problem are like nothing I’ve really encountered in my physics career, and they’ve really helped me grow in confidence, and as a physicist in general. Unlike some placements, the people I’ve met and had the chance to talk to will undoubtedly help me in the future, as the startup industry is so connected, and I’ve learned so much from every person I’ve interacted with, and I’m very pleased that I got to experience the startup scene so early on in my career, as it’s opened up so many possibilities, some of which I hadn’t even considered before this. As of writing, I’ve been approached by another startup company who are interested in what I’ve done with Paperfold, and have asked me to help with some part time work for them. This is a massive turning point as it really shows that what I’ve done is actually appealing to people. The process before I actually obtained the position was also a huge learning curve, attending scientifically based interviews is a totally different experience from anything I’ve ever done, and so it’s invaluable for the future. In a different aspect, I’ve had the chance to use programming in an actual real world scenario. As well as coding in HTML & CSS relatively consistently, I have been able to look at the app being coded, and updated, and this has really helped me to envision the kind of work it would be, and again has helped shape my idea of what I’d like to do in the future. The top graph shows spend on campaigns, while the bottom shows engagements with the app. Toward the end of my research and targeting, the engagement graph grows relative to the spend graph, showing more efficient advertising, and the engagements were more consistent. I would like to thank SEPNet and Queen Mary, University of London, for facilitating my placement, and the team at Paperfold for making my time there so enjoyable, and such a positive experience.