consulting and startups
For more than a decade I've been working in startups, consulting, and generally helping build, launch, and grow businesses.
I take on consulting clients semi-regularly if I think there's a good fit between my interests, experience, and the problems facing a given business. If I don't think there's a good chance I'll deliver good outcomes for a business, I won't take on the work. Pretty simple.
Consulting focus
I'm comfortable doing pretty much anything in an early stage startup except writing code or making figmas. That said, I really enjoy a few areas (and subsequently am pretty good at them). I define these relatively broadly because I think high quality execution is inherently comprehensive vs narrowly optimized. It's also worth noting that any area of focus below I'm comfortable and have worked soup to nuts—i.e. from strategy development, to leading and growing teams, to on-the-ground execution.
- Commercialization / Revenue
- Everything to do with getting, keeping, and growing as high quality of customers and revenue as possible, preferably on a recurring basis.
- That means everything go-to-market (G2M), growth, marketing, sales, retention, pricing, packaging, etc...
- Product
- This is a bit of a misnomer because I really see Product and Commercialization as two sides of the same coin / tightly interwoven. You can't do one (generate revenue) without the other (have something to sell) and doing either well is recursively beneficial to the other.
- What this usually comes down to is product vision, roadmap development, customer and/or user feedback, spec creation, UI/UX design optimization, technical/engineering support, etc...
- Operations and Culture
- The culture of a team is the emergent property of how those people work—together, with each other, with external parties, etc...
- I have spent a lot of time working in, building, and growing high performing teams (and making countless mistakes in the process).
Sample Engagements
- Launching an AI-driven ETF
- Helping form and serving on the independent trustee board
- Collaborating with the manager on commercialization, QAing and providing feedback/iteration on growth efforts
- Helping a B2C crypto business pivot to B2B
- Stand up an outbound sales process
- Hire their first sales person (job spec, hiring process, hands on interviews)
- Close their first customer
- Product development support to ensure business could anticipate and deliver on first customer "must-haves"
- Driving a B2B SaaS upmarket
- Outreach and connections to larger enterprise buyers
- General G2M strategy and advising on sales process
- Execution support navigating enterprise sales process
- Taking product led growth from nascent to early scale
- Advising a SMB SaaS business with poorly understood funnel metrics on scaling Inbound/Product-Led-Growth (PLG)
- Took regular but inconsistent PLG (~$0 - 750/mo inbound ARR) to expanded, consistent with minimal spend ($3,000+/mo inbound ARR)