VP of Sales and Business Development

Context

Two jobs in one:

1. Turn the lifestyle business into a real B2B ad platform. Tim, the founders, and the lead engineer built a proprietary ad optimization platform for financial brands. The specific insight: the end-of-article ad slots on financial content sites were being filled with "ugly celebrities" and foot-fungus ads. MyFinance would replace those with highly monetized, contextually relevant financial content. 2. Scale the two-sided marketplace. Enterprise sales into financial brands (advertisers) on one side; biz-dev with premium publishers (inventory) on the other side.

Numbers

• Grew publisher inventory from bloggers → mid-tier sites → CNN Money, MSN Money, Yahoo Finance.SalesStrategy
• 8-figure acquisition, December 2017, by Red Ventures — subsequent to Red Ventures' Bankrate.com acquisition. 16 months from Tim's start date.StrategyFinanceSales
• Why Red Ventures bought: MyFinance was stealing placements from Bankrate — but generating so much more demand from those placements that even after rev-share, Red Ventures was making more money than before. Buying MyFinance brought the knowhow in-house.StrategyGTM
• MyFinance's monetization approach became the category standard for financial-publisher monetization.ProductStrategyGTM

How Tim got the job

Met the MyFinance founders while still at Civitas. They were looking for ideas on how to grow what was essentially a lifestyle business producing personal-finance content to generate leads for mortgage refi, savings accounts, and credit cards.

Tim helped them see a completely different business model — the one they ended up building together.

What Tim chose next

• Declined to relocate to South Carolina (Red Ventures HQ).
• Became a free agent — Jane's CEO recruited him from here.

Interview-safe stories

• "Ugly celebrities and foot fungus." The wedge insight — the specific ad-slot arbitrage that reframed a lifestyle business into an industry standard. Great cover-letter material.ProductStrategyGTM
• "Stole placements from Bankrate and got bought by them." The paradox of building a competitor so effective the incumbent had to acquire it.StrategyFinance
• "Turned down South Carolina." Frame: personal agency, chose optionality, walked into the Jane role next.Strategy

Skills exercised

Enterprise sales into financial brands, biz-dev with premium publishers, CRM implementation, competitive analysis, complex contract negotiation with household-name customers, product co-creation with founders, category-creation storytelling, positioning against an incumbent (Bankrate) that ultimately bought the company.