Hi 👋 I'm Jess; An entrepreneur, award winning marketer, and operations fanatic here to help you create marketing your customers will love.
If you’re reading the ‘About’ page you’re probably looking to learn more about me, so here’s the quick version:
My goal is to help make great marketing feel doable for you by sharing strategies, playbooks, and tactics from the big budget players. I’ve ran over $1BN in paid media, launched thousands of campaigns, and analyzed more data then you can imagine, and I’m sharing it all!
I’m an avid Call of Duty player and actually met my partner on the game. He was 12 hours away but eventually made the move to start building our life together.
Here’s the long story
I grew up with my grandparents, working in our family business before and after school and running my own lawn mowing empire in the summer (along with various childhood side hustles like selling mix tapes, personalized currency, et al.)
I had an unconventional child hood which left me with a strong sense of purpose and confidence that I can conquer anything I chose, regardless of my experience or expertise in an area, as long as I work hard.
This led me to be the first-in-the-family to do a lot of things; starting college part time at 15, moving to Italy at 16 for a year abroad, graduating from college, launching and selling a company in my early 20s, moving to NYC to work in VC-backed startups, publishing a book, grad school, and more.
Growing up I never really knew what I wanted to do, but I knew I wanted to build a company and team. My grandparent’s goal for me was to be a shift manager at a fast food chain and then eventually buy into a franchise model and open up a series of stores. I have no clue where this dream came from, but for them that is what the path to success for me looked like.
So, naturally I did the exact opposite. I had started at University of Wisconsin in Madison part time when I was 15 and decided that after graduating from high school I wanted to finish my undergraduate degree.
My grandparents were very disappointed and felt it was a waste of money and time and routinely asked me when I was going to quit and start working.Â
Then I got my first engineering internship which was salaried at $35k annually, and then the second which paid $47k, and then third which was over $50k.Â
My grandparents were over the moon and finally warmed up to the idea that college wasn’t such a bad decision, especially when I had secured a $72k internship with one of the largest Banks in the US that would make me eligible for a rotational development program and fast-track me for leadership.
I also loved the work and thought I had potentially found the career I’d spend my life working in.
But, naturally I changed directions now that they were on board.Â
The year prior a friend and I had launched a site designed to gather advice and resources for undergraduate students and it was starting to take off. Over 30 contributing writers were sending at least one (free) article a month and the Adsense money was starting to cover the cost of hosting.Â
On one hand I had secured a highly competitive internship that would set me up for long-term success in the Process Engineering field, but on the other hand I had a growing company that could benefit from my undivided attention for a summer.Â
So I turned down the internship and devoted the summer to entrepreneurship. Worst case it failed miserably and I would “get a real job” when I graduate.
The business did well and I learned a lot that summer, specifically that I was not ready to lead a company, especially a venture-backed startup.Â
I made the decision that after graduation I would pursue both Process Engineering and Startup jobs and go with whatever position would best prepare me to eventually lead a company.
My grandparents also spend the summer asking me if I was doing selling drugs or doing something illegal because they just couldn’t understand how I was making money going to coffee shops and why I kept meeting up with strangers from the internet.
My first job after college came down to two final candidates:
- A Process Engineering job at a multi-national company in Philadelphia with clear career advancement paths and a potential rotational development program and grad school tuition reimbursement. The job paid near 6 figures, plus hiring bonus, plus relocation assistance and everyday I would go to a window-less office with salmon colored cubicles that felt like they were eating my soul when they flew me out for an on-site interview.Â
- A Conversion Rate Optimization analyst role at a British startup, located in NYC, that paid 1/3 of what the other job did, with no moving assistance or career pathing who initially rejected me, but agreed to do an interview when I told them I was going to be in NYC and had some availability for the next week.
So naturally I took the second job and moved to NYC with a friend I met on a Twitter marketing chat.
My grandparents were besides themselves. Not only did I pick the job that paid way less but I was moving from our 7k person town to New York City, and moving in with a “random man I met online”. They thought I was out of my mind, but they’ve never understood or supported my goals so I was unphased.Â
Spoiler alert, that random man I met on online was Pavel Konoplenko, co-founder of my current company, podcast co-host, and friend.
I really enjoyed the work I did at the first company, running A/B and Multivariate website testing and conversion rate optimization on Fortune 500 sites that get more traffic in one day than this site will get in a decade.
In that role, I saw firsthand the power of data to drive marketing results on a huge scale. It was captivating, but something was missing.Â
Optimizing the web experience was only one part of the entire user journey. I wanted the opportunity to take a step back and look at the bigger picture, from that first touch point (usually social media or advertising) to driving people to a site and multi-touch funnel.
I also was missing mentorship and visibility into company decisions to help me learn how to eventually run my own company.
After 9 months I moved to a different startup.Â
My grandparents were shocked I left a job during the first year and told me no one will ever hire again after this. (they were very wrong).
So when the Head of Marketing left to join a different MarTech startup I followed him and it’s the single greatest decision I ever made. I have the visitor badge from the in-person interview I secretly did after work one day.
That next role changed my life, because of the work I did, the team I worked with, and the leadership I worked for.
It was a small team, about 45 people in the office on the first day and 30 on the next. Most of the sales team was let go my first day, which maybe should have concerned me but I was too excited for the opportunity ahead of me to notice the red flags.
Being candid, this was over in the early days of brotech culture and a lot of what I experienced first hand made the antics in Silicon Valley (the show) look mild. The red flags I can see only in retrospect, they were just a normal part of startup culture in those days.
Working with so many brands gave me a very unique perspective on what was and wasn’t working on social media. I would routinely run intentional tests to understand how Facebook treated duplicate content or if the latest twitter algorithm change impacted publishing times. These insights were shared at panels and events around NYC and on multiple social media news sites including Social Media Today, jklfdsalkjfdsal
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Specifically, I’m really proud of the following:
- Being one of the first Pinterest advertising partners
- It was during this time I launched my first online-course and started submitting to speak at conferences, specifically about how to run Pinterest Ads since I managed $2M+ in a short period of time
Spoiler alert, Neil Patel stole my content.
- It was during this time I launched my first online-course and started submitting to speak at conferences, specifically about how to run Pinterest Ads since I managed $2M+ in a short period of time
- Building out the paid social programs for Time Inc, Bloomberg, and Condé Nast which later turned into entire dedicated departments and revenue-driving programs.
- Wearing a ton of hats, including overseeing product development for an Ad Buying interface, architecting a robust reporting suite, helping on sales calls, speaking at company events and conferences, and more.
- Navigating a few really intense conflicts with co-workers that would have pushed most people to quit.
- Running over $20M in paid social spend. Â
My grandparents told people I was a “social medium” and routinely asked when I was going to move back home and get a real job.Â
Working with so many brands gave me a very unique perspective on what was and wasn’t working on social media. I would routinely run intentional tests to understand how Facebook treated duplicate content or if the latest twitter algorithm change impacted publishing times. These insights were shared at panels and events around NYC and on multiple social media news sites including Social Media Today, jklfdsalkjfdsal
My grandparents told people I was a “social medium” and routinely asked when I was going to move back home and get a real job.Â
Thanks to that experience and the wide range of clients I worked with, by the time I entered my late 20s my work was featured in case studies on Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest, I published a book on social media marketing, contributed to multiple industry publications, and spoke at events around the country about how to leverage social media to drive business growth.
As the company it was time for me to find a new challenge to continue growing my skills. I then repeated that experience of building out a paid social program for a leading creative agency in NYC before leading the Growth Marketing/Demand Generation/Performance Marketing functions at NS1, Movable Ink, and Metadata before launching my own fractional marketing agency, Some Growth Agency.
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Today I split my time between running a popular fractional marketing agency, chatting with marketers making an impact on Marketers Talking, and creating playbooks and templates to make good marketing more accessible for everyone.
Outside of work I’m an avid but mediocre Call of Duty player, advise growing startups, and regularly share dog photos.