$0 → $6M GMV, 20K → 400K users, one lean team
Ran growth, product, sales ops, and marketing for a lean cause-marketing platform — and learned that the operator-builder is the unlock when nobody else is coming to help.
20× users
Across two years
The moment it clicked for me was the day Segment came online.
I'd stood it up as our customer data platform, and I watched a clean data taxonomy cascade through every layer of the business — the customer experience, the lead engine, the way the sales team prioritized their day. One well-designed pipe doing the work of a team we couldn't afford to hire.
ImpactFlow was tiny. Software engineering, sales, customer success, marketing — all running off the same handful of people. Because we were that lean, I got to manage every function at different points. We had to substitute tooling and automation for headcount, so I built and ran the systems that let a small team behave like a much bigger one.
That's where the operator-builder thesis got proven for me. Not as a thesis — as a survival mechanism.
$0 → $6M GMV. 20K → 400K+ users in under two years. It got me my first dedicated marketing ops job and locked in the conviction I still run on: ops teams that build are the multiplier, not the bottleneck.