A writing portfolio
ConGo
By: Keegan & Ian
A group of college students explore enticing opportunities at their new summer sales job, both technically legal and definitely illegal.
Series Synopsis
Best friends Tom Winters and Giovanni Trelli need a job to fill their summer before senior year at UCSB. Enter ConGo, a vast, internet-based, e-commerce enterprise with a lucrative Summer Sales program especially appealing to the wayward college student.
On a product level, ConGo sells everything and anything you could imagine—some would even say from A to Z. On an emotional level, they’re really only peddling one thing: convenience. And ConGo’s Summer Sales program takes convenience to a whole new level, bringing their customers’ wishlist items right to their doorstep.
Tom, Gio, and a few friends made along the way, initially struggle to find their place among the misfit force of insufferably confident, bro-cultured sales reps. But when they discover ConGo’s refined data mining algorithms prove to be a key performance-enhancer, they quickly climb the company’s ranks. As Tom, Gio, and friends start to scratch the top, they find themselves delving deeper and deeper into something lurking beneath, an underground operation where ConGo has set their ever-expanding sights, and their algorithms, on a new horizon: the black market.
Inspiration
The series was first inspired years ago, when Keegan spent his 2016 and 2017 summers in Utah between semesters at UCLA and stumbled upon a unique phenomenon gripping Utah’s college-age population: “summer sales.” To the unfamiliar, summer sales was basically advertised as a legal get-rich scheme where all you had to do was sell solar panels or kitchen knives or pest control services for three months and you’d make six figures before fall classes picked up again. Ian was also living in Utah at the time, and was no stranger to summer sales himself, attending many “free pizza!” summer sale orientations on the outskirts of Brigham Young University’s campus. He never actually filled his summer selling anything, however.
Now if the premise wasn’t enticing enough, Ian and Keegan couldn’t help but fascinate over the very distinct culture surrounding these summer sales programs and the sales reps looking to lure the next batch of solar panel peddlers/knife negotiators/pest purveyors. Keegan half-jokingly but also not-jokingly suggested to Ian that the summer sellers should drop all of that and simply go around door-to-door selling people their online wishlists, since customers have conveniently told us exactly what they want to buy already. And, even if they haven’t said it exactly, certain companies have probably already calculated it by now with the way our data’s leveraged these days, right?
That half-seriousness grew to a comedy series-ness where Keegan and Ian wanted to bring to life the stories surrounding summer sales while also exploring the data-driven aspects of e-commerce to its logical, and darkly comic, endpoint.