Portfolio Highlights
Launch Events
Kevel lacked an ongoing, structured way to communicate new product and feature releases to customers resulting in customers feeling Kevel was not shipping new products. I created an ongoing program to better structure releases with ongoing release notes, monthly product update emails, and quarterly release webinars. Our first webinar saw over one third of our customers represented with a turnout rate of 70% of registrants and an average NPS score of promoter.
Competitive Conquesting
Through competitive research, I recognized one of Kevel's key competitors was in a weak position. I saw an opportunity to win notable accounts and created a competitive conquesting GTM strategy to target them. Of the targeted accounts, we brought in 50% to the sales pipeline with 45% advancing to an RFP stage, and 20% won, including the largest closed won deal in company history at the time. Campaign metrics were hyper effective with a campaign return of 18,700%.
Crafting Kevel’s First ICP
Sales was wasting a significant amount of time qualifying prospects and losing deals in later stages. I recognized Kevel was missing a data-driven Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). Using a regression analysis, I determined which attributes of deals were most likely to result in a win or loss. I then mapped those attributes to point values to score incoming deals decreasing time to close by 33% and increasing deal velocity by 91% YoY.
Launching a Fund In Lockdown
I joined a seed fund syndicate with MBA peers to invest in startups. We needed to build deal flow pipeline in a newly remote COVID environment. I leveraged LinkedIn for a coordinated fund launch, jumpstarting deal flow and deploying capital within months of founding. Investments include:
Repositioning Kevel
Kevel's challenges were textbook "crossing the chasm" symptoms. Kevel was positioned too broadly to succeed. I repositioned Kevel to focus on a subsegment of the ad serving market in retail media with a multiday C-suite workshop. I then relaunched Kevel and it's suite of products as The Retail Media Cloud through refreshed enablement materials and focused marketing messaging on retail. Since repositioning, deal velocity increased 250% YoY, and quarterly revenue growth increased 132% YoY on average.
Investing in EthSign
As part of the USC Marshall Venture Lab, graduate students conduct due diligence on a startup with up to one investment being made by the Marshall Venture Fund per class. I conducted due diligence on EthSign. a cryptographic token-based e-signing platform, writing the investment memo and presenting to Venture Fund board. The Marshall Venture Fund invested $50k, the largest check size awarded. EthSign later raised $12 million with investors including all three units of the Sequoia VC from the US, China, and India.