United States
I help small businesses and startup companies tell their story to the world and find customers, allies, and partners on their growth path.
It's quick, easy, and typically very affordable to add me as an independent consultant to your marketing and biz dev team, to help you ramp up that growth.
Since February 2014, I've consulted with High Sierra Showerheads, a small, family-owned business making awesome water- and energy-saving shower heads at their factory in the California mountains. I've assisted my client with everything from cold outreach to obtain earned media coverage (in publications like the San Francisco Chronicle and Wall Street Journal) and product reviews, to awards applications, e-mail campaigns, and social media presence.
So far in 2022, I initiated their first affiliate marketing program and have managed and grown it, as well as sparking and leading their efforts to build presences within multiple industry directories. I've also been collaborating with other consultants and in-house participants to improve the company website's messaging, design, and SEO, following a late 2021 website refresh by an outsourced team. This work has been creative, challenging, and enjoyable, and I'm looking forward to the opportunity to work with you in similar ways on behalf of your own business!
In addition, over the course of making small Regulation CF and A+ investments in more than 40 startups, along with participating in small, crowdfunded loans to over 25 local businesses, I've been immersed in campaign pages, pitch decks, and Q&A responses to investors, both great and not-quite-so-good. If you're considering a fundraising, let's check in about whether I can help you streamline and distinguish your own messaging and communications to make your pitch or campaign stand out?
If you're already thinking about how activities similar to these – carried out by an independent, highly self-directed consultant – might benefit your own small business or startup, you can contact me via the website button (with the "link" icon) below. Or message me on LinkedIn, if you wish, to start the conversation.
I'm eager to learn about your business's unique situation. The next step is usually a no-cost exploratory call (audio or audio+video) of 15-60 minutes, where you tell me about your business and its advantages, opportunities, goals, and challenges. And we can then discuss whether there might be one or more ways I can affordably help it achieve those goals and address those challenges, at this juncture of its growth path.
An Instagram post on behalf of High Sierra Showerheads. This post spotlighted one of their products having been chosen by a couple who are building an off-grid home using shipping containers, and who've been documenting their journey to a YouTube audience of over a million subscribers.
An example of earned media coverage obtained on behalf of High Sierra Showerheads. I found and reached out to a freelancer, Amy Westervelt, who had an impressive portfolio of writing on business and environmental topics in top publications. By seeking a good fit with her past works, I was able to successfully pitch her on the idea of spotlighting High Sierra's novel invention of a shower head based on a golf course irrigation nozzle, and her article was published in the WSJ.
A company profile created on Crunchbase on behalf of High Sierra Showerheads. This profile concisely describes the company's business and unique products, as well as highlighting its many favorable product reviews on prominent websites like CNET, Wirecutter, and CNN Underscored. Crunchbase has been described as "the master record of data on the world’s most innovative companies."
A Quora Answer created in response to a member's question about under-recognized product innovations. It introduces three shower head companies with radical innovations in nozzle technology – Methven, High Sierra Showerheads, and Nebia – using various collision and atomization techniques to make their shower spray. Each of these nozzle designs is wildly disruptive to the product's 200-year-old conventional design.
An email campaign message advertising High Sierra Showerheads' Black Friday Sale, in the (challenging) pandemic year of 2020. In collaboration with their team, I wrote the text copy for this mailing, created its layout, created and/or selected its graphics, etc.
An email campaign message advertising High Sierra Showerheads' products to a recreational vehicles-focused audience: owners of RVs, camper vans, and travel trailers. To obtain interesting and useful content to share with its readers, I made connections with a trade association (CampCalNOW), an RV park and campground (Frandy Park Campground), and an Instagram influencer in this space (Marco Calera).
Feedback to Steve Mazza and other execs at PalX, a shipping logistics firm launching a B2B service for providing and managing durable, trackable shipping pallets, that tested the waters for a potential crowdfunding campaign on Republic.co in 2021. Their campaign page was well-crafted, yet it was still hard to understand their key differentiators at a glance. This was my attempt to understand, synthesize, and summarize them in an impactful way, and share that with their team.
Feedback to Shane Dyer, CEO of Irrigreen, on the company's announcement of a 2.0 release of their innovative digital sprinkler heads which can irrigate just within the contours of a planted lawn or garden, in a manner akin to 3D printing. As a small investor in their startup, I noted some questions that past and prospective customers might ask, which may not have been fully addressed in that announcement.
An entry-point User Guide page I created for the community that uses Savio, the High Performance Computing (HPC) cluster for researchers at the University of California, Berkeley. This overview serves as a "40,000-foot" introduction to faculty, postdocs, grad students, undergrads, and visitors who are new to the cluster. (This page, still in use to this day, was migrated to its current GitHub Pages-based documentation site in 2020.)