Internship Experience at TurtleMint

TurtleMint is an Insur-Tech Startup based out of Mumbai, India. It was started with the vision to make insurance easy to understand and accessible for all Indians. Today it has a network of over 1,00,000 partners who use the MintPro platform by TurtleMint to sell insurance. This network has allowed them to make a strong presence in the country, not just in the urban areas but in tier-2/3/4 cities as well as rural areas.

I joined the company as a technology intern in October 2020. The first couple of weeks were spent understanding the business as well as the current tech stack, meanwhile, I also started interacting with the team to understand the roadmap for the next few months to understand the problems that we needed to address.

Soon, I started my first project which was to analyze the sales data to find out what parameters affect the sales of the insurance and how can we tweak them to maximise our sales. Since this was an entirely new project, we limited the scope to just motor insurance and I started an exploratory analysis. I spent the first 2 months of my internship on this, during which we learned multiple things regarding sales. This was a challenging problem because, for most revenue/sales analysis, the basic hypothesis of the cost vs demand model holds true, i.e. lower the cost of a good/service more will be the demand, however that is not the case in Insurance, as while buying insurance, the cost is not the biggest factor people consider, there are multiple other factors that are equally important. Once I shared the learnings from this project with the Data Team, I moved on to the next tasks

For the remaining 4 months of the internship, I worked with the Payouts team as a software developer and worked on the backend as well as the frontend to implement multiple features.

There were multiple features I worked on which included upgrading the production database to include a new field according to a new logic, implementing the notifications regarding the status of the payments for the partners using the MintPro app, and several other features for an internal tool used by other teams at TurleMint.

The tech stack of Turtlemint included Java(Spring Boot), React, MongoDB, AWS. We used Reactive Code across the products we maintained for efficiency.

The internship was a very educational experience for me overall as this was the first time I was writing and releasing code that was being used by hundreds of thousands of users. I also learned about the importance of unit tests and got the experience of working with an agile team.

I wrapped up my internship in April and was really grateful to the entire team for the opportunity and the help throughout.