SaaS: 9 proof points
Rows on the facts page whose own text or source section carries "SaaS". The product name links the page with the full text. All skills.
| Role | Product | Situation | Task | Action | Result | Year | Skills |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Associate Product Director at Novo Nordisk (contributed, one of a team) | Wegovy Pill launch Wegovy Pill launch, consumer workstream | Pitched for and invited onto the launch team for a company-critical initiative to inject new thinking (very unusual for a digital role). Digital, packaging and direct distribution sat in separate silos, each with its own assumptions. | Lead the HQ consumer workstream. | Applied subscription-model thinking to connect the physical product to digital fulfilment: QR codes on the boxes linking to the digital experience, and work with production on bundling three boxes in a tertiary carton. | Contributed to the largest pharma launch on record. | Feb 2022 - Feb 2026 | pharma, healthcare, patients, growth, retention, launch, marketing, SaaS, team leadership, international, consumer, budget |
| 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 |
| Head of New Media, Host Europe Group | New Media New Media department: all online touchpoints, ecommerce, digital campaigns, email marketing and SaaS dashboards across all brands | Promoted from web designer to management team to take ownership of the end-to-end online presence across multiple brands. | Create the department from scratch and run every online channel across every brand: ecommerce portals, SEO, branding, UX, email marketing, blog, development, copy, creative and reporting. | Built a team of five to six. Established KPIs and web metrics to steer the business. Prioritised the development roadmap and briefed the development teams. Introduced self-service support and pioneered site-building tools. Optimised the support centre. Built the affiliate marketing, content marketing and online ads programmes. Scaled SEO to #1 for "domain names", "web hosting" and "dedicated servers". | 123-reg became the first company to register 1 million .uk domains. Sat on the Senior Management Team and the on-call duty rota, still in his 20s. | Jan 2006 - Jun 2008 | turnaround, SEO, funnels, KPIs, roadmap, 0 to 1, brand, marketing, SaaS, startup, ecommerce, domains, web hosting, team leadership, stakeholders |
| 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 |
| 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 |
| Sales Executive, Host Europe Group | sales competition First job, answering phones in web hosting sales | Graduated into the dot.com bust with no jobs. Got a foot in the door answering phones at a web hosting company: not his passion, but the way in. | Be good at it while finding the way to the web team. | Learnt to listen to customers by answering the telephone. Won the annual sales competition. Spent evenings and weekends on the alternative website (row 31). | Won the competition. Nobody expected it, so the prize changed from a Psion organiser to a record player, still in use. The alternative website got him into the web team the following year. | Mar 2003 - Feb 2004 | turnaround, SEO, funnels, 0 to 1, brand, marketing, SaaS, startup, ecommerce, domains, web hosting, team leadership, stakeholders |
| Head of New Media, Host Europe Group | 123-reg 123-reg.co.uk, the group's domain brand | Running all online channels for a group whose biggest brand was a domain registrar in a market with several larger rivals. | Keep the registrar growing while the group went through acquisitions and a rename. | Owned ecommerce and every online channel for the brand: the domain search and order process rebuilt earlier, #1 organic rankings for "domain names" and "web hosting", the affiliate programme, online ads and early content marketing through the blog, and the KPIs and web metrics to steer it all. | 123-reg became the first company to register 1 million .uk domains, on a platform doing 2M+ unique monthly visits. | Jan 2006 - Jun 2008 | turnaround, SEO, funnels, KPIs, 0 to 1, brand, marketing, SaaS, startup, ecommerce, domains, web hosting, team leadership, stakeholders |
| Group Design Manager, Host Europe Group | group design Design across the group's brands after the Pipex acquisitions | Via acquisitions the company became part of Pipex, the UK's fourth largest broadband provider: multiple brands, multiple offices, each with its own design. | Manage the web design output for the whole group and keep the ecommerce funnels improving while the brands were being stitched together. | Coordinated a team of designers and developers across multiple offices. Created the project and campaign briefs. Led ecommerce across the brands and kept optimising the order process. Laid the SEO groundwork that the New Media department later took to #1 for the core terms. | Design and ecommerce run as one function across the brands. The platform reached 2M+ unique monthly visits in this period. Promoted to Head of New Media in January 2006 to build the department around it. | Aug 2005 - Jan 2006 | turnaround, SEO, funnels, 0 to 1, brand, marketing, SaaS, startup, ecommerce, domains, web hosting, team leadership, stakeholders |