SubAssist: Building Trade Office Automation Product

Market Problem: 
In the production residential construction space, plumbers, electricians, and other subcontractors contract with large home builders to build hundreds of homes. Subs then receive Purchase Orders for each unit of work. Checking the purchase orders for errors (+5% error rate) and then entering the data into their accounting system is manual and time-consuming. Their field teams spend a quarter of their time ordering supplies for each unit of work. 

Who’s it for: 
Construction Trades, Small Businesses

What we did: 
SubAssist is a new SaaS product built to automate subcontractors’ offices working with production builders. I was brought in to lead the development of the product by an outsourced team of developers after 6 months of the founder unable to direct them to execute his vision. To get the product back on track, I outlined milestones and worked with the team to execute the plan to engage with a major partner and begin to go to market with customers. 

We launched with a group of early adopter customers within 9 months and then iterated to meet their needs across our three core use cases: managing digital versions of paper contracts, automated reconciliation purchase orders, and ordering supplies for each job without human interactions. 

As part of the go-to-market, we engaged with major suppliers for specific trades and developed a messaging plan and strategy to target business owners in the building trades. 

Success metrics:
  • 3 paying customers in 18 months with $20k+ ARR
  • +$15,000 in Purchase Orders error identified per customer per month
  • $100m estimated impact by industrial supply company ready to partner

SubAssist Dashboard


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Onward Financing: Mortgage for Movers Home Loan Product

Market Problem: 
In the residential real estate market, there is a market inefficiency that makes existing homeowners less attractive buyers in a competitive seller’s market. Conventional loans require a payoff of your current mortgage before you can close on your new home making you a less attractive contingent buyer. 

As a contingent buyer, selling your home is your only option, but lining up two complicated, large financial transactions that rely upon multiple parties makes the entire real estate market less efficient.  

Who’s it for: 
Homeowners looking to upgrade, downsize, or reduce stress in their next move and the real estate agents that advise them

What we did: 
We created and launched a private loan that allowed the home buyer to show their current home as free and clear of financing. This removed the contingency from their new home purchase allowing them to get the best financing possible and making them essentially a cash buyer. 

To accomplish this new loan product, we developed relationships with a local bank to back our origination and gained approval from the major home mortgage wholesalers. We then went to market by working directly with real estate agents in the Minneapolis/St Paul metro area with a partnership strategy that provided them more flexibility for their clients. 

We iterated these loans to allow for less risky transactions for our funding sources and simplify them for the borrower. This led to a significant online presence and sales collateral that positioned our unique differentiators for both the borrower and real estate agents. The loan initiation process was automated across systems to reduce operational labor.

Success metrics:
  • +500 loans initiated in a 2-year period
  • +150% growth in loan volume generated YOY
  • Less than 1% breakage rate

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YA Engage: Virtual Rebate Card Product

Market Problem: 
In the promotional marketing space, rebates are a long-standing tool for acquiring new customers and incentivizing action without the full expense of discounts. Rebate VISA prepaid cards became the reward of choice for many manufacturers and service companies in the 2000s, but as customers adopted virtual payments, they began to cause friction in the customer experience.

Promoters were interested in virtualizing this experience, but the virtual rebate cards in the market provided a poor, slow, and nonbranded experience for users. Most were issued by legacy banks with inflexible technology platforms.

YA’s customers needed a solution that was just as secure as these other options but provided a unified user experience within their promotional website.

Who’s it for: 
Promotional marketers at Fortune 1000 companies and their consumers

What we did: 
To build a seamless virtual card experience, we partnered with the leading prepaid card bank (Meta Bank) and completely reimagined the experience for a rebate consumer (other options were targeting additional use cases). Because YA verifies a user’s identity, we were able to eliminate many of the steps required by the bank’s compliance department. 

YA’s virtual rebate card product was incredibly simple: once the user was verified in our fraud-protected rebate process, we would instantly create and display a branded card specifically for the user using a series of APIs and connected interfaces within the customer’s rebate website. Within seconds of a consumer submitting their rebate, they could use the rebate card, including in-store to drive rebate dollars directly back to the retailer.

Success metrics ($25m company):
  • $1m revenue preserved in at-risk revenue and an additional $1m revenue from other clients in 12 months
  • Rapid deployment for stunt marketing event for Bud Light after the 2018 Super Bowl
  • <1 second from submission to distribution of a card versus hours or days for competing solutions



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YA Engage: Solution Design Organizational Restructuring

Market Problem: 
When I started at YA, my mandate was to create a product team and turn the platform under redevelopment into a scalable system to run clients’ promotional marketing programs. However, when I observed how clients chose the services and wanted to be sold programs, it became apparent that the company was not structured to serve their clients’ needs. 

Additionally, there was a significant cultural divide between the teams that sold engagements and the teams that executed the programs. Through years of miscommunication, there was distrust and a lack of accountability, leading to major moral and execution issues. During my first month, I observed 4 retrospectives for promotional marketing programs that had gone wrong.

Who’s it for: 
Internal Executive Leadership

What we did: 
Within 6 months, I shifted the structure and discipline of my team from Product Management to Solution Design. We created a new role that would work directly with sales teams to understand client needs and then build promotional marketing programs using a series of our productized modules. The clients were able to explore the possibilities and then an expert in our capabilities applied the needs to what we could execute.

Internally, this new role took responsibility for clear documentation of the projects, along with teaming with the financing to better price profitable engagements. Once sold, they would present the promotion to the development and operational teams and take ownership of the promotion to reduce back and forth with the client. The execution teams no longer needed to interpret what was sold and the sales team could focus on finding the next opportunity.

Success metrics ($25m company):
  • 3-day reduction in the time required to estimate new projects from 5 to 2 days
  • 30% project revenue size increase
  • Improved client satisfaction and employee engagement



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Lakana/Internet Broadcasting - Platform as a Service Migration

Market Problem: 
Lakana was the product of three companies in the local television digital space rolled up to achieve dominance in the market sector. As digital platforms, each company operated custom websites for our multitenant clients: content management system, consumer-focused mobile apps, monetization integrations, and third-party partnerships with local media-specific applications. 

As a combined customer base, Lakana hosted over 200 digital presences and held ~50% US market share. However, to operate efficiently, we needed to move forward with a single platform and technology stack. Our new combined product team faced a challenge as the leadership team had chosen the platform to move forward with, but it did not have parity functionality with our other platforms. 

Who’s it for: 
Medium-sized technology company going through a merger while continuing to operate

What we did: 
To move to one platform and bring our customers along, we took an approach that would ensure our customers continued to operate with little disruption and then transition to a better solution on our timeline. This required the following steps:
  1. A comprehensive gap analysis of the platform teamed with customer interviews to understand the importance of key features. One of the outcomes identified was an elections platform that could be integrated and sold separately.
  2. A clear execution plan to fill gaps that prioritized the customer needs with special attention to the risk of losing strategic clients. 
  3. Ongoing communication strategy that brought clients along and got them excited to transition to a new platform.
  4. Development of a new product flavor for the smaller station groups once the major clients were satisfied. 
  5. Internal roadmap alignment with the infrastructure, development, and client success teams that made sure each part of the program was in order and everyone was telling the same story.

Success metrics:
  • Successful migration of 80% of major clients
  • Voluntary conversion of current platform tenants to the new version
  • 3 new products were developed and launched: Elections, Small TV Station Groups, and Updated White Label Mobile Apps


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Lakana - Small TV Station Groups Product

Market Problem: 
In the local television station market, the landscape is dominated by large station groups with dozens of stations across the United States. Few station groups would be defined as midsized, but many with just a few stations. 

Lakana had a dominant share in the market for large station groups with 3 of the top 5 players as customers for our digital platform (website, mobile apps, and monetization), but our offering for the rest of the market, while highly flexible and powerful, was too expensive and required significant focus and resources to operate that the smaller groups could not afford.

However, without these small groups as potential customers, our growth path was limited. 

Who’s it for: 
Small to midsized television station groups with ownership of less than 10 stations across the country

What we did: 
To address this segment of the market, we defined and then created a flavor of our product with highly configurable content modules and standardized frontends. This new version of the product was deployed on a shared technology stack with prebuilt integrations into the most popular third-party applications for media companies.

The product was easy to demo and quickly gained acceptance by customers who needed to be migrated as part of a merger. Our positioning on RFPs in this part of the market was greatly improved as we could compete at their desired price point. Even our enterprise customers asked to take much of the new functionality in their next upgrade.

Success metrics:
  • 100% conversion by existing small customers in Lakana’s portfolio
  • 70% reduction in onboarding time for clients, a major concern for smaller groups
  • Increased release cycle speed from 6 months to 3 months


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CaringBridge - SupportPlanner Product

Market Problem: 
When families are going through a health crisis, they have basic needs that they can not do for themselves but often can be too embarrassed to ask for help. Whether they need someone to drive them to treatment or simply meet their kids when they get off the bus, they usually have a community around them looking to help.

Who’s it for: 
Families going through a health crisis

What we did: 
As CaringBridge’s second product, we worked through the entire product development process starting with research and customer discovery that led to a business case. Once the Board approved, we built and launched a product that virtualized the task and calendar experience many of our users were doing offline. We then connected the SupportPlanner to our users’ CaringBridge site where they were telling their stories in a secure environment. 

Success metrics:
  • 25% increase in community creation
  • 25% expansion of donor base
  • Secured first nonprofit grant in CaringBridge’s history of $50,000



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CaringBridge - Replatforming Transition


Market Problem: 
Founded in 1997, CaringBridge is a social platform for families experiencing health challenges who want to share their stories safely and securely. CaringBridge’s business model is a donor-driven nonprofit that relies on community members to be so engaged that they would help fund the platform. 

As a 15-year-old platform, CaringBridge had not been fully updated and rearchitected since its launch. When the company decided a rebrand and repositioning was necessary, the product also needed to be updated to meet the new brand promise, but the existing technology could not support a facelift or provide major new features.

The biggest problem, beyond rebuilding a beloved product with 20+ million annual visits, was respectfully migrating existing communities.

Who’s it for: 
Platform in transition

What we did: 
Partnering with our Architect, we devised a plan that would reduce the risk of users rejecting a new user experience and allow for a firm end-of-life date for the old platform. Instead of a hard cutover for communities and users, we rebuilt the current experience with a “Faux” interface on our new infrastructure after extensive performance tests. 

Next, we slowly rolled communities over to the new experience first voluntarily (getting feedback along the way), then new sites, and finally an orderly transition based on community activity. This allowed all sites to be moved off the old infrastructure, reducing costs, and ensuring the acceptance of the new normal by users.

Success metrics:
  • Less than 3-month development timeline of the “Faux” experience assisted by known workflows and use cases
  • 3-month transition timeline
  • Continuity of important business metrics including activity and donations

 
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Zepol - Trade Data SaaS Product

Market Problem: 
Imports into the United States are tracked by U.S. Customs and are public records. Until 2004, only one company (PIERS owned by the Journal of Commerce) had purchased this data and made it available to subscribers. Without a competitor, PIERS had grown into a thriving subscription business but was also complacent in its market position and unprepared for new entrants challenging its position.

Who’s it for: 
Fortune 500 competitive intelligence librarians, logistics business development managers, and sourcing professionals

What we did: 
Zepol was launched in 2004 and grew to be a significant competitor to PIERS in the $20 million trade data sector gaining approximately 15% market share over 6 years. To achieve this growth, we utilized a lean startup mentality throughout the entire business from product development, sales, marketing, and support. 

Zepol was an early adopter of sales and marketing tactics that are now common for startups. Leads came primarily from search engine marketing and utilizing content, both on our blog and media partnerships established through sharing data. Our sales team embraced a cloud CRM, online demos, and a structured sales process to achieve both pipeline growth and bottom-of-the-funnel conversion. 

Throughout my time at Zepol, I ran our marketing programs, support team, and directed our developers (managing our roadmap and defining features). This led to the establishment of a QA process and product marketing-driven launches.

Success metrics:
  • Grew company revenue from $182k to $3.2m in 5 years
  • Establish paid and organic marketing programs that delivered 50+ leads per month for the sales team
  • Transformed product from a single developer’s vision to a customer-driven product with insight cited in dozens of publications each month



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