Eric Legaspi

I'm a longtime touring musician that began a transition into tech three years ago after attending Startup Institute, a competitive and intensive career accelerator, providing training, knowledge and networks to transition into the industry.  

After completing the program, I spent a year working with a Real Estate tech startup called MatchPad, focusing on helping people find roommates.  During a 30 day sprint, we rebranded and redesigned this desktop application to be mobile-first, incorporating not only roommate matching, but also the ability to search listings as a group and coordinate communication with agents.  Like many employees at early-stage companies, I wore a number of hats but contributed substantively to a number of core product features - most notably, a shared communication feed for groups to stay on the same page, delivering messages from the app directly to real estate agents via text message, and incorporating listing feeds directly into our backend.  Unfortunately, like many early-stage startups, the company eventually folded, but it was well worth it to see the startup experience up close and personal.

My work with Tech2025 also put me in touch with a wide array of companies and experts in throughout the tech scene in New York.  An educational series that focused on bringing the general public greater knowledge and experience with emerging technology, I was also able to get real-time "user stories" while showcasing different products and advancements, and engaging in vigorous debate about their merits and how people outside of the industry viewed their implications.  Holding tech events for people that don't usually attend tech events was eye-opening and often brought up questions and ideas I'd never hear anywhere else.

I've been working part-time for a full-service digital agency called CBI Digital for the last year, doing a mix of SEO and project coordination, while splitting my time between our offices and working remotely.   Our agency's deep knowledge of and experience in SEO is one of our competitive advantages, we've worked with several startups in various capacities and I've learned a great deal about content optimization through managing blogs for two different clients.  

Specifically, LawTrades, a very young legal services platform, has worked with us for about a year to gain traction ahead of their next raise.  During my time on the project, I developed a content process to create and optimize a large amount of blog posts, using extensive keyword research to find topics and assign them to their writers, edit and optimize them for select keyword groups and publish them on a regular schedule, eventually ramping up from 10 to 20 blogs per week.  Our efforts have not only given them a library of great content, but also tripled their organic traffic.