Yodle & Web.com
I started at Yodle, a B2B SaaS company driving inbound leads to local businesses, as an IC running paid search and local SEO lead gen campaigns. That turned into a people-leader role running the teams behind those campaigns.
One of the more meaningful wins there was a re-org that combined two separate teams, aimed as much at a better customer experience as at operational efficiency. When Yodle was acquired by Web.com, I kept expanding my team and scope before eventually leaving to build experience beyond localized demand gen.
esurance
At esurance, I led a team responsible for acquiring new policyholders through email and direct mail. The program was about a year from being shut off entirely. Within about a year, it was the most efficient acquisition channel in the business, which made the case for a 5–6x budget increase.
Two unlocks got us there:
Partner management
A routine business review with our email acquisition partner surfaced something nobody had acted on: we'd never shared data with them, so they'd never been able to build a real propensity model. I worked with security, legal, and data to share policyholder data and run the first tests. Model-driven campaigns outperformed the legacy approach almost immediately, which let us scale spend with confidence instead of guesswork.
Marketing analytics
The program had been optimized toward cost-per-quote, a mid-funnel metric that looked fine while masking the actual problem. Working with our analytics team, we moved to ACIY (our version of CAC: policies insured × years insured), optimizing for insured-years per dollar spent. That number correlated directly with retention and lifetime value, and it's what unlocked the budget case.
Credit Karma
At Credit Karma, I managed an engagement marketing team on the hook for double-digit growth on a $30–40M/year credit card business, monetizing the member base through owned channels, including email, push, and in-app, with personalized card recommendations.
Two things drove that growth:
Finding new member pockets
We pushed hard to break into the prime member segment, but ran into a real product-market fit problem: we didn't have many of the best reward cards on the platform, and credit scores aren't something people check often enough to create a strong engagement hook.
A new channel
We became one of the first marketing teams to use the in-product surface, pioneering the process and best practices for it from scratch.
The team delivered 25% YoY revenue growth, from the mid-$30Ms to the mid-$40Ms, until March 2020, when COVID upended the business overnight. What I did next →
The Themes
Partnerships First
It takes a village to execute a successful program. The esurance unlock came from finally listening to a partner we'd been ignoring, not from a new tool.
Lead With Data
An eternal desire to quantify, then let the data validate or invalidate the assumption instead of just confirming it.