Inside the 12-Week Paid Internship: A Week-by-Week Look

Most internship descriptions are vague on purpose. "Help support the team." "Learn about our industry." "Gain exposure." Translation: even the company doesn't really know what the intern is going to do.

We took the opposite approach. Our 12-week program is structured down to the phase, the deliverable, and the scorecard. You know exactly what you're going to do, what you'll learn, and what the bar is for converting to a full-time offer at the end.

Here's the actual map, week by week.

Weeks 1–4: Foundations

The first four weeks are not "shadowing." Shadowing is what unpaid internships do because they don't have a system to plug a junior into. We do.

Week 1 is onboarding. You get logins to our CRM, Hunter.io, ZeroBounce, ChatGPT or Claude, our outreach engine, and our internal docs. You read three things: the playbook, the recent wins log, and the lessons learned file. You sit in on two live sales calls and one bid review.

Week 2 you start producing. You generate your first verified prospect contacts using our standard workflow. You draft your first cold email. You read it aloud to your manager. You revise it. You send it.

Week 3 you build volume. By end of week, you should be running the daily outreach workflow end-to-end without supervision. You're producing 15-25 verified contacts per day. You're writing emails that get sent the same day. You're learning the rhythm.

Week 4 is a field day. You ride along with a crew to a live job site. You see what the customer sees. You meet the operators. You understand what you're actually selling. This day will reframe everything you do for the rest of the program.

By end of week 4, you should be able to answer three questions without thinking:

• Who is our ideal customer and why?
• What's our daily output target for prospecting?
• What do the AI tools we use actually do, in plain English?

Weeks 5–8: Production

Now you own a book. You have a list of target chains. You have a daily quota. You have a CRM you're responsible for. You are not asking permission to do work. You're reporting on the work you did.

This is the phase where most interns hit a wall and then push through it. The wall is volume. You realize that doing the work manually is slow. You start asking your AI tools to do more of it for you. You build a Notion dashboard that tracks your own pipeline. You write a Python script that pulls a CSV from one tool and pushes it into another. You stop being a person doing tasks and start being a person who builds systems.

Specific deliverables during weeks 5-8:

• Verified prospects: 250-400 added to the database
• Cold emails: 300-600 sent, all personalized
• Follow-up cadences: Managed across 50+ active conversations
• Negotiations and award debriefs: You sit in. You take notes. You ask questions in the debrief.
• One workflow upgrade: You ship a process improvement that makes someone's job easier. Could be yours. Could be the team's.

Weekly 1:1s with the founders during this phase are tactical. What worked. What didn't. What to try next. No theater, no "what are your goals" therapy session. Pure feedback on output.

Weeks 9–12: Ownership

The final phase is where you find out what kind of operator you are.

You pick a vertical or a process and you own it. Examples from real interns:

• One intern picked auto dealerships as a vertical. By week 12 she had a list of 87 verified facilities contacts, had run 23 cold emails, and had two conversations going. One of them converted to a paid pilot in week 14.
• Another picked the photo documentation workflow. By week 12 he had cut the per-project time from 2 hours to 8 minutes via a Puppeteer script he built (with Claude's help). The script is now used on every job we run.
• A third picked outbound LinkedIn DMs. By week 12 she had built a workflow that produced 200 personalized outbound messages per week with a 14% reply rate, which is roughly 4x our cold email reply rate.

Your weeks 9-12 deliverable is whatever you pick. The bar is: did the company change because of you?

The Final Scorecard

Week 12 ends with a sit-down with both founders. We review:

1. Output: Did you hit your numbers?
2. Quality: Was the work good or just voluminous?
3. Initiative: Did you ship things nobody asked you to ship?
4. Communication: Did you keep us informed without being asked?
5. Cultural fit: Would we want you in a foxhole?

If the answer to most of those is yes, we extend a full-time offer in that meeting. Base of $50-70K plus commission. Benefits. Real seat at the table while we scale to $100M.

If the answer is no, we have an honest conversation about what to work on next. We do not extend offers to people who didn't earn them, and we do not pretend otherwise.

Why This Structure Exists

Most internships are vague because they're designed to extract free labor without producing much value for the intern. Ours is structured because we actually need the work done and we actually want to convert top performers to full-time hires.

That alignment is the whole game. When the company wins from your output and you win from the same output, everything works. When the company wins from cheap labor and you "win" from a line on your resume, nobody really wins.

The 12-week structure is our commitment to alignment. If you want it, apply below.