AI Business Development & Solutions Intern

LlamaPress | Salt Lake City, UT | Part-Time, Paid Internship

$8.10/hour base pay + uncapped sales commission

LlamaPress builds AI-powered business software for organizations that still run important operations through spreadsheets, email, forms, PDFs, and repetitive manual work.

We're looking for an unusually resourceful, Utah-based university student to work directly with our founders at the intersection of business development, customer discovery, market research, and AI solution building.

This is not a traditional marketing internship.

You will talk directly with business owners, non-profit leaders, university department staff, and operators across Utah. You will learn how to uncover real operational problems, identify business opportunities, and use modern AI tools to help turn those problems into working software.

You'll experience almost the entire startup process firsthand:

Find a prospect → start the conversation → understand the problem → design a solution → prototype it with AI → help win the customer.

What You'll Do

1. Business Development & Sales

You'll help create new customer opportunities for LlamaPress.

This includes:

• Researching prospective customers
• Cold calling and emailing businesses and organizations
• Finding and contacting relevant decision-makers
• Conducting thoughtful outbound outreach
• Setting up customer discovery meetings
• Following up consistently with prospective customers
• Building and maintaining a sales pipeline
• Developing relationships across Utah's local business, non-profit, and university communities
• Using warm introductions and existing relationships when appropriate
• Participating in customer meetings and sales conversations

You will receive training and direct founder mentorship, but you should also become increasingly comfortable creating opportunities independently.

A major part of the internship is learning how to reach people who don't already know you and give them a compelling reason to have a conversation.

2. Primary Market & Customer Research

You'll conduct real primary research to understand how organizations actually operate.

You might interview:

• Business owners
• Non-profit directors and program staff
• University department leaders
• Program directors
• Administrative staff
• Operations managers
• Finance teams
• Other people responsible for complicated internal processes

We're particularly interested in finding important processes currently managed through:

• Excel
• Google Sheets
• Forms
• PDFs
• Email
• Manual data entry
• Repetitive administrative work
• Disconnected software systems
• Legacy software

Your job is not simply to pitch software.

First, you'll learn how to ask good questions.

You'll investigate how the current process works, where people lose time, what causes frustration, what mistakes occur, and what a substantially better system might look like.

3. Build Cutting-Edge AI Solutions

This is what makes this internship different from a typical sales internship.

When you discover a promising customer problem, you won't simply hand your notes to someone else.

You'll work directly with LlamaPress's founders and our AI development platform to help turn customer discoveries into working solutions.

For example:

You might interview a university department running a complicated scheduling process through several spreadsheets.

You could then:

1. Document how the existing process works
2. Identify the biggest bottlenecks
3. Work with AI to model the workflow
4. Help create a prototype application
5. Put that prototype back in front of the customer
6. Gather feedback
7. Help move the opportunity toward a paid implementation

You do not need to be a professional software engineer.

You do need to be excited about learning how modern AI tools can be used to build real software and solve real operational problems.

What You'll Learn

You'll get hands-on experience in:

• B2B sales
• Cold outbound
• Prospecting
• Customer discovery
• Primary market research
• Business process analysis
• AI application development
• AI-assisted software building
• Startup strategy
• Product development
• Sales pipeline management
• Working directly with customers
• Turning customer problems into software
• Turning prototypes into business opportunities

This is designed to be a highly experiential internship.

Rather than studying sales, entrepreneurship, and AI separately, you'll practice all three against real problems with real organizations.

Direct Founder Mentorship

You'll work directly with the founders of LlamaPress.

We'll train you in:

• Customer discovery
• Prospect research
• Cold outreach
• Sales conversations
• Business process analysis
• AI-assisted application development
• Opportunity qualification
• Pipeline management

We'll regularly review your outreach, meetings, discoveries, prototypes, and opportunities with you.

As you demonstrate competence, you'll receive increasingly significant responsibility.

The goal is for you to leave the internship substantially more capable of finding customers, understanding businesses, using AI, and creating new opportunities than when you started.

Who We're Looking For

We're looking for a rare combination of:

Initiative + social confidence + curiosity + persistence + resourcefulness.

Strong candidates can usually point to situations where they have already made difficult things happen without someone constantly telling them what to do.

Relevant experience might include:

• Outbound sales
• Appointment setting
• Customer acquisition
• Fundraising
• Recruiting
• Starting a business or side project
• Running a student organization
• Organizing events
• Developing partnerships or sponsorships
• Customer-facing work
• Campus leadership
• Competitive leadership experiences
• Building communities
• Getting meetings with people you did not previously know
• Building something using AI

We particularly value people who know how to open doors.

That might mean you have built strong relationships across your campus or your city.

It might mean you're connected to entrepreneurs, non-profits, or local businesses.

It might simply mean you have repeatedly demonstrated that you're unusually good at meeting people, earning their attention, and making things happen.

You May Be a Great Fit If

You:

• Are comfortable talking to strangers
• Can handle rejection without losing momentum
• Follow up when other people would give up
• Are genuinely curious about how organizations work
• Ask good questions
• Notice inefficient processes and immediately wonder how they could be improved
• Communicate clearly with technical and nontechnical people
• Enjoy meeting new people and developing relationships
• Have built a meaningful network on campus or in the local community
• Are interested in entrepreneurship
• Are excited about AI and emerging technology
• Learn new software quickly
• Take ownership without needing detailed instructions
• Want substantially more responsibility than you would receive in a typical internship

Your major matters much less than your behavior.

Students studying entrepreneurship, marketing, information systems, management, operations, finance, computer science, or related fields may be especially well suited.

Students involved with entrepreneurship programs (such as Lassonde), business student organizations, campus leadership, startups, or other highly active communities are strongly encouraged to apply.

Compensation

This is a paid internship with meaningful performance upside.

Base Compensation

$8.10/hour

Approximately 15 hours per week during the semester.

Sales Commission

In addition to your hourly pay, you'll earn a significant commission on qualifying business you help generate.

Our typical initial customer engagements can generate hundreds of dollars in commission from a single successful sale.

For example, a qualifying sale could result in approximately $300+ of additional compensation.

There is no fixed cap on how much commission you can earn.

A student who becomes effective at creating and helping close opportunities can therefore earn meaningfully more than the base hourly compensation. Multiple successful deals during the semester can add hundreds or thousands of dollars in additional compensation.

Exceptional performers may have the opportunity to earn compensation approaching multiples of their base pay through commissions.

Exact commission terms and attribution rules will be provided in writing before the internship begins.

What Success Looks Like

This isn't an internship where success means showing up and completing assigned busywork.

We want you to develop real professional capabilities while creating measurable results.

We'll track things such as:

• Prospects researched
• Outreach experiments conducted
• Conversations started
• Customer interviews completed
• Operational problems documented
• Meetings generated
• Qualified opportunities identified
• AI prototypes created
• Customer feedback gathered
• Business opportunities advanced
• Customers won

A successful intern should eventually be able to receive a broad objective like:

"Find Utah businesses, non-profits, and university departments struggling with spreadsheet-heavy operational processes."

…and independently figure out how to make meaningful progress.

Over time, you should become increasingly capable of:

1. Finding interesting organizations and people
2. Getting conversations with them
3. Conducting strong customer discovery
4. Understanding complicated operational processes
5. Recognizing meaningful business opportunities
6. Using AI to help prototype possible solutions
7. Presenting those solutions back to customers
8. Helping turn successful discoveries into paying customers

Example Project: Utah Customer Discovery

One potential assignment might be:

Identify Utah organizations — local businesses, non-profits, and university departments — running important operational processes through spreadsheets or manual workflows.

You might:

• Research organizations, departments, and programs
• Identify relevant owners, directors, administrators, or faculty
• Get introductions
• Conduct interviews
• Ask how their processes currently work
• Identify frustrating spreadsheet-heavy workflows
• Document the problem
• Work with our founders to build a prototype
• Return to them with something tangible
• Gather feedback
• Help determine whether there's an opportunity to work together

This combines market research, relationship building, consulting, entrepreneurship, sales, and AI development in one project.

Schedule

Approximately 15 hours per week during the semester.

We'll design the schedule around your classes while expecting consistent weekly execution and accountability.

Some work can be completed remotely.

However, this role is particularly well suited to students who are active in Utah — on campus and in the local business community — and excited about building relationships across both.

What This Internship Is Not

This is not primarily a social media internship.

It's not an internship where you sit behind someone and watch them work.

And it's not a classroom simulation.

You'll work on real customer problems.

You'll talk to real decision-makers.

You'll use real AI tools.

You'll build real prototypes.

And you'll have the opportunity to help create real revenue.

That comes with substantially more responsibility than many traditional internships.

How to Apply

Please do not send us a generic cover letter.

Instead, attach your resume and answer the questions in the application form below. We care much more about evidence of initiative than credentials.

One Final Thing

We're looking for someone who wants to learn how modern businesses are actually built:

Find people. Understand problems. Build solutions. Create value. Sell. Learn. Repeat.

If you've repeatedly found ways to make things happen without being given a roadmap, we'd like to meet you.