Intern Interview #2: 'Real Ownership From Day One' — Yuta Imai

At DynaMeet, interns play meaningful roles across engineering, sales, and marketing — each person contributing to how the team grows. For the second installment of our intern interview series, we sat down with Yuta Imai, who handles sales and marketing, to hear his unfiltered take on the experience.

What brought you to an internship at DynaMeet?

During my job search, I realized I wanted real business-side experience before graduating. I'd done a high school exchange program and later helped run an organization that supported incoming international students and Japanese candidates heading abroad. I'd also worked part-time at a restaurant. But hands-on experience in actual business functions — sales, marketing — was something I'd never had. I wanted to find out what that actually felt like.

As I went through the recruiting process, I started to think that knowing where you'll work matters less than knowing what you'll actually do and how you'll grow. Looking back at my own behavior, I noticed I was anchoring on company names and industry prestige rather than the work itself. To sharpen my picture of what a real job looks like, I figured the best move was to put myself inside a company as an intern and get into the work directly.

I found DynaMeet when I was actively looking for intern opportunities and happened to receive a LinkedIn outreach from co-founder Sawano-san. I'd always been drawn to building businesses, so the chance to understand how a whole company operates — and the close access to leadership — genuinely appealed to me. The opportunity to work under Sawano-san, who has a track record at international IT firms, and Ayan-san, who leads product design, is what ultimately led me to choose DynaMeet.

How do you balance the internship with school and your job search?

I received an early offer from one company, so I wasn't applying to a huge number of places — the job search has been manageable. I also banked a lot of my course credits by the end of sophomore year, so my class load isn't heavy. That's given me the freedom to put the internship first. I'm in the office about two or three days a week and I'd like to increase that going forward.

Walk us through your day-to-day responsibilities.

I was hired on the business side — sales and marketing. I joined as an intern last December. In the early months the split was roughly 50/50 between the two. On the sales side, I focused mainly on cold calling and cold emailing. On the marketing side, I built case study blog posts for the company website using WordPress and ran LinkedIn promotional campaigns.

As I got more comfortable in the role, I talked things through with Sawano-san and shifted toward a heavier focus on BDR and SDR work. Concretely, that means building prospect lists, making cold calls, and working toward booked meetings as the core goal. Right now my primary focus is building targeted lists and running outbound email campaigns. In terms of volume: when cold calling was my main activity, I was making around 50 calls a day, two to three times a week — so roughly 100 to 150 calls per week. For cold email I don't have an exact count, but the volume is significant. Sawano-san has been clear that in inside sales, volume matters more than perfection, so I prioritize output.

What's been rewarding — and what's been hard?

On the rewarding side, I have a defined role and real freedom to think for myself and get things done. Being at a startup means there's a wide range of work to go after, and getting genuine responsibility and ownership over my area is what makes this feel meaningful.

On the hard side, you can't generate meetings just by going through the motions of sales — that's genuinely difficult. Target selection is huge. Through conversations with Sawano-san, I've learned how critical it is to define exactly who you're going after before you start outreach. I keep that in mind as I build lists, run campaigns off those lists, and reflect on what each round of outreach taught me so I can apply it to the next one.

There's also the challenge — and the motivation — of maximizing output per hour. If someone else finishes a task in an hour, I want to do it in 30 minutes. Developing the skills to deliver more value in less time is both the hardest part of this work and what keeps me engaged.

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Thank you, Yuta! Watching you take on challenges every day in your sales work inspires the whole team. We can't wait to see how you continue to grow. At DynaMeet, we're committed to building an environment where driven people discover what they're truly capable of.