This Week in Startups
One of the most consistent signals in tech: founders talking shop, lessons from the arena, and a weekly reminder that building is a craft.
# My story.
The year was 1997 and Windows 95 was the latest and greatest technological personal computing thing. I was living in Sacramento, California. I started building my first content site that year. I was 17 years old. The content site I built was about Gran Turismo, this racing game on Playstation (yes, the original). I was obesseed. Unhealthily. It had one of those little site counters at the bottom of the page. I thought that was so cool. I checked it every day, sometimes multiple times a day. I built that website on Yahoo! Site Builder and the rest as they say is history.
Fast forward to 1999 and I start working in sales -- car sales, then pagers and cellphones -- then transitioned into the mortgage space in 2003 and then eventually digital marketing in 2009 which brought me full circle back into my web 1.0 roots working as an affiliate marketer generating leads for financial services clients in North Miami Beach, Florida. This experience, combined with my sales background, allowed me to develop a strong foundation in performance marketing while adapting to the diverse needs of businesses in financial service categories like mortgage, debt, and personal loans. This was the foundation for my later work in home improvement, insurance, mass tort, and many other categories.
Driven by a desire to generate passive income in conjunction with understanding how technology could amplify my sales and marketing efforts, I taught myself how to code in PHP in 2008 and spent years building marketing platforms, analytics tools, and automation systems. My experience with HTML and CSS helped me build landing pages, marketing campaigns, and other marketing assets for various companies in many different industries. When I first got into backend development, Joomla and Wordpress were the latest and greatest architectures so naturally I built websites with them. Python and my education at MIT gave me the tools to build machine learning models and predictive analytics systems starting in 2013.
Since the beginning of my marketing career, I've founded 7 companies, built over 1,500 landing pages, launched over 10,000 marketing campaigns, and built AI-powered platforms that are responsible for generating millions in revenue. My latest focus has been on machine learning and building tools that use predictive analytics to optimize campaign performance.
I still build landing pages, marketing campaigns, and other marketing assets for various companies in many different industries, but I cannot get away from Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) and Machine Learning (ML) while leveraging the power of AI, because I am completely obsessed with it.
Currently I spend most of my time consulting. Life seems to be pushing me towards taking everything I have learned throughout my career and applying it to a very specific set of clients and projects (like this one) with AI and ML at the core.