The marketing playbook under a unicorn.

ShipBob, a Y Combinator company, offers fulfillment and logistics to small and mid-sized e-commerce businesses. When I joined, we were working out of a chilly warehouse in Chicago; the company was closing its Series B with Bain Capital, and nobody had ever held a marketing title there. Sales were blockbuster. What didn't exist was the foundation underneath them: positioning, measurement, a content engine, a PR engine, and a way to turn demand into revenue at scale.

I joined the executive team and built marketing from the first hire up. We announced the Bain round, and I worked with Bain on investor communications and the launch of everything that followed. Then the blocking and tackling, which I'd argue is the most underrated work in marketing: positioning and messaging for SMB e-commerce owners, a lead generation program across channels, a content engine that produced week after week, and a PR engine that put ShipBob in national business press, including The Wall Street Journal.

I also ran the inbound sales team. I hired and trained ten reps, built and refined the cadences we tested and rewrote, and supported the outbound team's work. Underneath it all was a measurement discipline: campaign performance, KPI tracking, conversion rates, and messaging updates driven by what the numbers said. That's the part that lasted. It became the playbook ShipBob ran for years after I left.

Lead generation grew 316% from the first quarter to the fourth, and marketing's quarterly revenue contribution grew 278% over the same year. Marketing-sourced leads produced more than $4 million in recurring pipeline, and the inbound sales team contributed 80% of the company's new revenue. ShipBob went on to a $1 billion valuation within three years of that foundation. One of my unicorns.