Most marketing internships hand you a Canva login and a posting schedule and hope you go away quietly.
This one is different, and here's the honest version of why: we're good at making things and bad at getting noticed. We've built one of the largest free auto-repair libraries on the internet — nearly 4,000 how-to videos, a YouTube channel with 100,000+ subscribers, and diagnostic scanners that do what $3,000 dealership tools do.
You'd be finding the creators, journalists, and communities who should know about us, and getting to them. Cold outreach. Real conversations. Deals that didn't exist before you made them.
If the phrase "I'd have to email a stranger" makes you want to hide, this isn't your internship. If it makes you want to open your laptop, keep reading.
Who we are
YOUCANIC has been helping people fix their own cars since 2015.
We build professional-grade OBD2 diagnostic scanners — bidirectional, full-system tools that used to live only in dealership service bays. We sell them with no subscriptions and no software fees, which is a quietly radical thing to do in an industry built on annual licenses.
Then we give the knowledge away. Nearly 4,000 how-to videos and 2,000+ written repair guides, free, covering everything from a Chevy Cruze oil change to Mercedes 38-pin diagnostics. Free VIN decoder, fault-code library, recall checker.
Our tagline is "YOU CAN be the mechanic." We're not being cute. Every video we publish exists so somebody doesn't have to hand a shop $900 for a job they could do in their driveway for $60.
We're a small team in Towson, one mile from campus. You'd work directly with the founder.
What you'd actually do
1. Find creators and make deals — your biggest job
There are thousands of people making car content right now — YouTubers, TikTok mechanics, DIY channels, independent shops with a following, car forums with real communities. Most of them are using diagnostic tools that cost more than ours and charge annual fees.
Your job is to find them and get our scanner in their hands.
- Build a target list from scratch — creators, shop owners, forum moderators, niche automotive communities — and rank them by fit, not by follower count
- Write outreach that doesn't sound like every other sponsorship email in their inbox
- Run the conversations: what we send, what they make, what it costs, what we expect
- Manage the relationship after the deal — shipping, support, follow-up, renewals
- Track what each partnership actually produced, so we stop guessing which ones are worth repeating
You'll hear "no" a lot. The ones who say yes will move our numbers more than any post you could schedule.
2. the long game
Here's a fact that should bother you: a company that's spent eleven years making car repair accessible to regular people has essentially no independent press coverage. No feature articles. No Wikipedia page. Journalists who cover right-to-repair — a live, contested policy fight right now — have never heard of us.
That's not because there's no story. It's because nobody has ever pitched it.
- Build a real media list: reporters covering right-to-repair, consumer tech, automotive, small business, and Maryland/Baltimore business
- Build a press kit that doesn't exist yet — company facts, founder bio, photography, product specs, the actual story
- Write and send pitches. Follow up. Track every response.
- Find the angles worth pitching: the right-to-repair fight, the no-subscription stance in a subscription industry, customer stories where someone saved thousands
- Get into award programs, "best of" roundups, industry publications, and podcasts
3. Turn customers into proof
Our customers are doing incredible things with our tools, pulling a code in their driveway that a dealer wanted $200 to read, diagnosing something three shops missed. That footage is on their phones right now and nobody has asked for it.
You'll build the system that asks: post-purchase outreach that gets customers leaving reviews on Google, Trustpilot and BBB, and sending us photos and video of their own repairs. Then turn that raw material into content that sells better than any ad we could write.
What we're looking for
The two things that matter most:
1. You're not afraid of strangers. Most of this job is contacting people who didn't ask to hear from you, getting ignored, and following up anyway. This is a specific personality trait and it's the one that will make or break you here. If you've done sales, recruiting, fundraising, cold email, event booking, or talked a professor into something — tell us.
2. You're curious about this stuff. You don't need to be a mechanic. But if the difference between a code reader and a bidirectional scanner sounds interesting rather than boring, you'll be great here. If it doesn't, creators and journalists will hear it in your first email. We'd take a curious car person we have to teach marketing to over a polished marketing student who finds this dull. Every time.
You should also have:
- Enrollment in (or recent graduation from) marketing, comms, PR, journalism, business, or similar — or work you've done on your own that proves the point
- Writing that's clear and sounds like a person. Your outreach emails are the job.
- Enough organization to run a pipeline of 50+ open conversations without losing track
- The ability to be in our Towson office for your scheduled hours
- Deadline discipline without being chased
Bonus points for: PR or journalism coursework, experience pitching media, influencer or creator outreach, CRM/spreadsheet fluency, YouTube Studio literacy, video editing (CapCut, Premiere, DaVinci, Descript), thumbnail design, Shopify or email marketing exposure.
What you get
Ownership of something real. Not "assisted with." You'd build our partnership program and our press function from zero. That's a rare thing to point at in an interview three years from now.
Skills that transfer everywhere. Media relations and partnership outreach are among the hardest things to learn and the most portable. Every company needs someone who can get a stranger to say yes.
Direct access to the founder. No layers, no approval chains, no waiting three weeks for someone to look at your deck.
Lastly, but important. When you answer the questions attached to this applicaion here on Indeed, please start each answer with the plus symbol. Please use the plus symbol at the beginning of every answer, even if it looks strange.
Pay: $15.00 - $19.00 per hour
Application Question(s):
- What's something you got obsessed with and went way deeper on than anyone asked you to?
- Go to Youtube find YOUCANIC channel and answer this question: What's the worst thing about our YouTube channel?
- Name a brand or creator you think is overrated, and why.
- The last thing you fixed yourself — what broke, and what did you do?
- What's a question you want answered before you'd take this job?
- Send us the last thing you made that you're proud of. Doesn't have to be marketing.
- Optional question. Find one thing on our website that's broken, wrong, or confusing. Send us the URL of the page in question and tell us what you'd do about it.
Work Location: In person
