conversion: 11 proof points
Rows on the facts page whose own text or source section carries "conversion". The product name links the page with the full text. All skills.
| Role | Product | Situation | Task | Action | Result | Year | Skills |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Head of Marketing, Opbeat | Opbeat Opbeat, developer tools SaaS startup providing application performance monitoring. Backed by the cofounders of Facebook and Instagram. | New product came out of stealth and lacked traction. The audience was developers, who are allergic to advertising. | Build the brand, marketing strategy, team and channels from scratch, and get traction without advertising at people who ignore advertising. | Learnt the developer audience by sitting with the engineers in the team. Defined the core product proposition and the developer narrative, and told the story. Built the brand, the team and the channels from nothing, then ran growth experiments across them. The two biggest levers, the meetup video engine and the pricing restructure, have their own rows. | Trebled traffic and sign-ups in 12 months. The brand became known in the Python, Django and Node.js communities. | Nov 2014 - Apr 2016 | growth, conversion, experimentation, KPIs, launch, 0 to 1, brand, marketing, SaaS, startup, developer tools, team leadership, international, budget |
| Marketing Director, EuroDNS | EuroDNS EuroDNS, an ICANN-accredited international domain registrar specialising in unusual domain extensions. Customers included MailChimp, Lotus F1 and Time Warner. | Four years of decline when Tom joined: traffic dropping, online sales down, a legacy website, and SEO damage left by a previous agency's black-hat work. | Turn it around. | Restructured the marketing department (four direct reports), implemented KPIs and rebooted every marketing channel including the website, in under 8 months. Remediated the black-hat SEO damage. Analysed user flow and redesigned the website and ecommerce funnels. Collected customer feedback and repositioned the product. Launched over 500 new domain extensions, repositioning dry domains with Creative Commons photography of the world. First provider to offer a free SSL certificate with every domain. | Decline reversed. Organic traffic doubled in 12 months. Bounce rate halved, from about 60% to about 30%. | Feb 2013 - Nov 2014 | turnaround, growth, conversion, SEO, funnels, KPIs, launch, marketing, ecommerce, domains, team leadership, international |
| Acting Marketing Manager US, UK2 Group | US Marketing department Managed all online and marketing activity across 5 web properties | Run remotely from the UK, with a team never met in person. | Rebuild the underperforming US Marketing department before recruiting a US-based successor. | Created the marketing strategy, implemented a reporting structure, set and met budget targets. | Bounce rate down ~15%; sales conversion nearly doubled; product roadmap created and 8 products launched in 10 months. | Feb 2009 - Feb 2010 | turnaround, growth, conversion, roadmap, launch, marketing, team leadership, remote, international, budget |
| Head of Marketing, Opbeat | Opbeat Opbeat, B2B devops startup backed by Balderton Capital and the cofounders of Facebook and Instagram | A small startup with no marketing processes, KPIs, reporting or budgeting, and a runway to extend. | Put the basics in and create enough traction to raise. | Introduced marketing processes, KPIs, reporting and budgeting to the business. Grew grassroots meetups and built a video engine to reach developers. | Traction that enabled a $2M bridge-funding round. | Nov 2014 - Apr 2016 | growth, conversion, KPIs, launch, 0 to 1, brand, marketing, SaaS, startup, developer tools, team leadership, international, budget |
| Independent Consultant | independent consultant Remote product and strategy consulting | Moved to Denmark after meeting a Dane on a ski slope; needed to finance the move and Danish studies (Prøve i Dansk 3) and wanted into the Danish startup scene. Former employers Host Europe (UK) and EuroDNS (LUX) needed product and strategy work; Everplaces (DK) was a local startup client. | Deliver product and strategy work remotely from Copenhagen while building a life in a new country. | Briefed senior management, product managers, designers and marketeers. Pitched products; produced user stories, specifications, storyboards and wireframes. Wireframed order funnels to improve conversion. Created the strategy to refactor the legacy control panel serving 3M domains. Wrote content and did SEO, including interviews with MailChimp, Creative Commons, the EFF, Rand Fishkin and Michael Palin. Remotely managed teams in the UK, Luxembourg and Romania. | Spotted Raspberry Pi before launch, got in touch and turned it into a sponsorship deal. The EuroDNS engagement turned into the Marketing Director role. | Sep 2010 - Apr 2013 | pharma, growth, conversion, SEO, funnels, launch, marketing, startup, domains, web hosting, team leadership, remote, international, stakeholders, partnerships |
| Web Designer, Host Europe Group | domain search Domain search on 123-reg: one text field that interpreted whatever the user typed and searched every ending asynchronously | Domain search was the key entry point for upselling hosting, and the UX was clunky. You typed a name, picked an ending from a dropdown and hit search, because each registry needed its own API call. One domain at a time, and users kept hitting taken names. Frustrating, poor conversion. | Nobody asked for it: the shop window of the business was a poor experience and worth fixing. | One text field, interpret whatever the user enters, search all endings asynchronously and show them together. First use of AJAX in the stack. | New revenue up 20% overnight. The approach became the industry standard: if you search for a domain anywhere today, this is how it works. | Feb 2004 - Aug 2005 | API, growth, conversion, funnels, domains, web hosting |
| PM/GM at LEO Innovation Lab | company all-hands the monthly all-hands | Optimising the onboarding funnel at LEO Innovation Lab, on the hypothesis that more notification opt-ins would raise activation. | Test a contextually-triggered opt-in shown at exactly the right moment. | The split test won on conversion but activation barely moved: the opt-in sat too late in the funnel. Rolled out a simpler opt-in early in the funnel, lifting net activation, and presented the mistake at the next company all-hands. | The monthly all-hands changed from presenting vanity metrics to mistakes made and lessons learnt. | Nov 2016 - Aug 2017 | healthcare, growth, conversion, activation, funnels, experimentation, launch |
| Head of Marketing, Opbeat | Opbeat meetup video engine Opbeat developer community channel | The audience was developers, who are allergic to advertising. Brand-building and acquisition with no budget for ads that would not have worked anyway. | Reach developers where they already were, and have them bring the audience. | Advertised for a video marketing intern to travel the world attending developer meetups, unpaid but all expenses covered. Filmed and live-streamed the meetups on the company blog; speakers promoted the stream to their own developer audiences. No direct advertising in the video; the audience captured with retargeting ads, organic traffic and backlinks. | Grassroots meetup presence and a content engine that fed the trebling of traffic and sign-ups. Scrappy, high-leverage. | Nov 2014 - Apr 2016 | growth, conversion, SEO, KPIs, launch, 0 to 1, brand, marketing, SaaS, startup, developer tools, team leadership, international, budget |
| Head of Marketing, Opbeat | Opbeat pricing Opbeat pricing and free tier | The pricing model inadvertently disincentivised upgrading, and there were barriers at the point of entry for a product that needed developers to try it first. | Remove the barriers to entry and to upgrade. | Found the disincentive in the pricing structure and persuaded the CEO to restructure it. Put the emphasis on the free tier so growth came from the ground up: developers adopt first, teams pay later. Demoted pricing from the navigation to the footer to cut friction at entry. | Pricing that no longer worked against the product's own growth loop, feeding the trebling of sign-ups. No separate figure for this lever. | Nov 2014 - Apr 2016 | growth, conversion, KPIs, launch, 0 to 1, brand, marketing, SaaS, startup, developer tools, team leadership, international, budget |
| Marketing Director, EuroDNS | EuroDNS SEO remediation EuroDNS organic search | A previous agency had used black-hat SEO. The damage was part of why traffic had fallen for four years. | Repair the search footprint and get organic growth back. | Implemented remediation for the black-hat SEO damage, analysed user flow and redesigned the website and ecommerce funnels on the back of it. | Organic traffic doubled in 12 months. Bounce rate halved, from about 60% to about 30%. | Feb 2013 - Nov 2014 | turnaround, growth, conversion, SEO, funnels, KPIs, marketing, ecommerce, domains |
| Marketing Director, EuroDNS | EuroDNS domain extensions EuroDNS domain product range | A registrar whose edge was unusual domain extensions, selling them to a customer base that had been shrinking. Hundreds of new extensions were arriving in the market. | Reposition the product and give customers a reason to buy from EuroDNS rather than the giants. | Collected customer feedback and repositioned the product. Launched over 500 new domain extensions: where most registrars showed extensions as word art, EuroDNS showed .aq with a picture of icebergs, Creative Commons photography with the author credited, so a string of characters became a place. Rebooted the newsletter and built content marketing around it, including interviews with Rand Fishkin and the EFF. First provider to offer a free SSL certificate with every domain. | Part of the turnaround that reversed four years of decline in traffic and online sales. | Feb 2013 - Nov 2014 | turnaround, growth, conversion, SEO, launch, marketing, ecommerce, domains, team leadership, remote, international |