Two decades turning complexity into market clarity.

Using evidence and experiments to find product-market fit

Problem

With founders from Blockbuster Express and Redbox, Canopy (gocanopy.com) was built to offer remote device management (or RMM) software for complicated, proprietary connected product solutions, making it possible to manage networks of self-checkout kiosks, point-of-sale systems, digital signage, cameras, and on and on. However, the product’s extreme adaptability to the unique hardware and software needs of customers resulted in fragmented approaches to marketing, sales, and even the product itself. A customer could use Canopy to manage thousands of golf simulators, as with Full Swing, or tens of thousands of live-streaming sporting events cameras. The team had an exceptional product that lacked go-to-market focus.

Solution

Upon reviewing existing research, interviewing customers, and consulting with senior leadership, a hypothesis emerged that quick-service restaurants like Chick-fil-A and McDonald’s had a special dependency on unattended technologies. Through content experiments on LinkedIn, Reddit, and X, the hypothesis was tested and validated. From there, marketing investments were made into original research, which were turned into lead-generating assets promoted through paid distribution.

Results

The company saw the largest number of inbound MQLs ever, with leads generated from McDonald’s, Taco Bell, Subway, Jack in the Box, Dairy Queen, Del Taco, Amazon, Uber, DoorDash, Yum!, Pizza Hut, KFC, Partech, Adyen, Deloitte, RICOH, Keurig Dr. Pepper, Cinemark, Brinker International (parent of Chili’s and Maggiano’s), Honey Baked Ham, TheMelt, as well as NCR, Olo, Star Micronics, RBI, Oracle, 5and5, Zebra, Esper, HME.

To further validate product-market fit, Canopy went on to land its first QSR business as a customer, one of the largest QSR companies in the world.

Role

Worked full-time as Vice President of Marketing from early 2024 to mid-2026 before shifting to fractional involvement. Operated as sole in-house marketing leader, managing a digital marketing agency, SEO and web development contractors, and internal subject-matter experts. Built and led marketing across positioning, content, customer storytelling, website strategy, organic growth, demand generation, and sales support.

Additional achievements

• Orchestrated an overhaul and rebranding of gocanopy.com, beginning with the homepage, to reflect new MCP and agentic AI product capabilities. Approach and execution achieved on a tight budget without design support.
• Advanced AI-discovery and answer-engine readiness, working with a product leader at answer.cloud.
• Produced customer webinars, turned customer proof and product expertise into long-form and short-form video content, articles, and social media.
• Developed company’s first newsletter. Planned, wrote, and launched content-led drip campaigns to nurture leads.
• Brought Canopy to the attention of the analyst community, including Gartner.
• Stood up thought leadership activated on third-party publications as well as LinkedIn.

Why it matters

Canopy became a working model for the NTEXT.co method: using customer evidence, market experiments, and original research to turn a highly adaptable product into a focused go-to-market strategy.

2026 Restaurant Tech Report 2025 Restaurant Tech Report Overcoming Downtime

Defining a category with a visual collaboration product

Problem

Mural entered 2020 with a leading enterprise product and a distinctive, loved brand. However, as remote and hybrid work accelerated, the visual collaboration category became more crowded. Competitors like Miro and Figma gained attention through product-led growth, and the broader conversation around the “future of work” and “remote work tools” needed to be grounded in how teams collaborate, make decisions, and execute together. Mural needed to advance its narrative from digital whiteboarding to a means for facilitating enterprise collaboration.

Solution

Worked with Mural’s founder and CEO for 18 months, translating his vision into a narrative playbook that elevated Mural from a digital whiteboard into a platform for guided visual collaboration across enterprise organizations like EY, Thoughtworks, Autodesk, and other global teams.

Developed and executed content strategy involving thought leadership, customer stories, webinars, event content, product launches, and executive communications. The work activated the voice of the customer while giving sales, demand-gen, product marketing, and executives a system for explaining Mural’s value.

Beginning in 2022, joined a select group of experts at Mural to work with category-design agency Play Bigger. Researched two dozen books on collaboration, facilitation, innovation, and organizational design in order to build authority around Mural’s launch of “Collaborative Intelligence,” supporting executive thought leadership, earned media, analyst relations, and long-form editorial work. This work extended into partnering with Mural’s Chief Evangelist, a published author on Jobs-to-Be-Done and expert on facilitating visual collaboration, to write a book with Mural founder on Collaborative Intelligence, published with Wiley in 2023.

Also in 2022, advised work with COLLINS as part of Mural’s 2022 rebrand, helping ensure the company’s evolving narrative showed up across web, content, sales materials, product launches, campaigns, and executive communications.

Results

Led content programs that drove demand, including Collaboration That Works, which generated 13,000 leads and 1,500 MQLs, and What It Takes to Make Hybrid Work, which generated 7,000 leads and 600 MQLs. Developed content for Forbes BrandVoice program, which delivered 186,000 impressions.

Led development and publication of Collaborative Intelligence (2023, Wiley), managing the project from concept through manuscript development, editorial review, and publisher coordination.

Managed communications for Mural’s Series B and Series C announcements, earning coverage in TechCrunch, Forbes, and Insider.

Role

In-house from 2020 through early 2023, working as senior director of brand, communications, and content.

Additional achievements

• Built and led content and communications programs that supported enterprise positioning and category authority.
• Helped shape executive narratives, founder content, internal communications, and customer-facing stories.
• Supported major brand and product moments with messaging, launch content, and editorial direction.
• Contributed to thought leadership programs, including long-form editorial work, research-led campaigns, and book-related content.
• Worked with Product Marketing, Growth, Sales, executives, agencies, and internal teams to keep the company story consistent across touchpoints.

Why it matters

The work helped move Mural’s story from product enthusiasm into a durable enterprise narrative grounded in design thinking, facilitation, and visual collaboration. For NTEXT.co, Mural demonstrates how category narratives become stronger when they connect founder vision, customer voice, subject-matter expertise, market context, and serious research.

Meet the New Mural Collaboration That Works Principles of Collaborative Intelligence Collaborative Intelligence (book)

Grounding a digital experience analytics product in relatable Jobs-to-Be-Done

Problem

Fullstory operated in a crowded category at the intersection of analytics, digital experience, session replay, product insights, and customer support. Joined the company in 2017, when ARR was under $10M and product-market fit was still being determined.

The product was powerful and flexible enough to serve many different teams. However, Fullstory’s widespread capabilities fragmented marketing, sales, and product strategy. These teams needed a focused way to express the highest-value use cases and identify where the product created the clearest value for customers.

Solution

Audited Fullstory’s existing content, including customer stories, product narratives, sales materials, and research, to identify more than a dozen Jobs-to-Be-Done use cases. From that broader list, narrowed the company’s focus around three core use cases that could serve as archetypal stories across marketing, sales, and product.

Those use cases reframed Fullstory’s value around recognizable buyer needs: understanding UX and diagnosing friction, improving conversion rates, and debugging customer issues. This helped move the story beyond broad categories like session replay or digital experience analytics and toward the concrete jobs customers needed Fullstory to perform.

To make the work usable across teams, architected a content library that organized existing assets by use case, persona, industry, funnel stage, and sales need. The library productized Fullstory’s content inventory, making it easier for marketing and sales to find, reuse, and activate the right materials in the right context.

Results

Gave marketing, sales, and product a shared language for explaining Fullstory’s value and prioritizing the customer problems most worth building around.

Helped turn a flexible, technically deep product into a focused set of buyer-facing, evidence-backed stories that could support campaigns, sales conversations, product narratives, and customer education.

Improved the usefulness of existing content by organizing it around how buyers actually evaluated and used the product, rather than leaving assets scattered by format or channel.

Built and led Fullstory’s content marketing function from the ground up, creating a repeatable content engine during a period of rapid company growth.

Helped establish category visibility through search-focused content, including ranking #1 for “session replay” and in the top 10 for “heatmaps,” two important educational and category-entry terms for buyers researching digital experience tools.

Role

Worked in-house as Fullstory’s content marketing leader, responsible for building the content function and translating complex product value into educational, editorial, search-driven, and sales-supporting narratives.

Additional achievements

• Developed category education, blog programs, ebooks, customer stories, sales enablement content, newsletters, and SEO-focused assets.
• Made session replay, digital experience intelligence, and related technical concepts more accessible to buyers.
• Created content that supported search visibility, sales conversations, product understanding, and category education.
• Turned product expertise and customer use cases into repeatable stories that could travel across channels.

Why it matters

Fullstory is proof of a core NTEXT.co skill set: using existing evidence to find the most valuable customer problems, translate technical complexity into market clarity, and turn that clarity into a content engine that supports growth.

Synergies in the Stack Three Parables ebook Definitive Guide to Session Replay Trust Pyramid (OpenView)

Learning sales storytelling and executive communication at platform scale

Problem

In 2010, inside Google’s large-customer sales environment, teams needed support persuading buyers to make significant year-over-year investment increases. Large advertisers were still shifting budget from traditional channels to digital, and sellers needed credible stories grounded in industry trends, consumer behavior, and platform capabilities.

Across Travel and Retail, the work required analytical judgment, audience awareness, and the ability to turn research into persuasive stories for sales teams and executive buyers.

Solution

Researched industry periodicals, analyst reports, and Google-proprietary data to develop research-backed narratives, pitch materials, and executive-facing insights for large customer conversations.

Built a research database that connected market evidence to customer priorities, helping sellers tell precise, compelling stories to support multi-million-dollar budget increases.

Also led original research and insight development, giving sellers proprietary materials for customer conversations and executive presentations.

Results

Helped sales teams turn market evidence, consumer behavior, and platform capabilities into clearer stories for enterprise buyers.

Supported major pitch efforts with research, strategic framing, and executive-ready presentation materials, including customer conversations tied to eight-figure advertising budgets.

Built a foundation in evidence-backed sales storytelling that later shaped work across Fullstory, Mural, Canopy, and NTEXT.co.

Role

Worked in industry analysis roles supporting travel and “big box” retail customers, including The Home Depot, Lowe’s, JCPenney, Dillard’s, Royal Caribbean, Carnival, and American Airlines.

Additional achievements

• Developed sales narratives and presentation materials for large customer conversations.
• Translated data, platform capabilities, and industry dynamics into buyer-relevant insights.
• Built digital media expertise by connecting industry research, customer needs, and platform capabilities.

Why it matters

Google helped form a core instinct behind NTEXT.co: strong marketing and sales stories are more persuasive when grounded in evidence.

Google Atlanta office logo installation

Entrepreneurship and product work

Building audiences, products, and points of view from scratch

Entrepreneurial roots

Early-stage work rewards people willing to build, test, ship, observe, and learn in public. Before NTEXT.co, several independent media and product projects helped shape the same method: start with direct observation, find a signal others are missing, build around it, and keep improving through evidence from the market.

Independent media and product projects

• 2007: Co-owned and operated The Mortgage Lender Implode-O-Meter. Built and ran an independent publication tracking the collapse of the mortgage lending industry during the financial crisis. The site turned fragmented market signals, industry news, and community attention into a timely resource for people trying to understand a fast-moving collapse. It served 50M+ visitors, built a 13K+ member community, generated more than $500K in revenue in 2008, and involved managing six researchers and writers. It was an early lesson in evidence gathering, editorial judgment, and the power of publishing into a market that urgently needed clarity.
• 2009: Built BirthdayShoes. Identified emerging interest in “barefoot shoes” before the release of Christopher McDougall’s Born to Run helped push the category into the mainstream. Built BirthdayShoes to aggregate stories from wearers of Vibram FiveFingers, publishing user stories, product reviews, use cases, and community-driven observations at a regular cadence. The site developed into a large independent publication and community, drawing 10M+ pageviews from 5M+ unique visitors and establishing Justin as an authority in a niche category before it was widely understood.
• 2023: Wrote and self-published Exec on the Desk. Ran a content experiment regarding remote work, return-to-office mandates, surveillance and AI, executive symbolism, and the gap between leadership narratives and employee experience.
• 2025: Built Un•AI•ify. Created a simple HTML-powered tool for revealing common AI-generated writing patterns using regex. The tool encodes years of writing and editing judgment and reflects a point of view on the relationship between persuasion and LLMs. Using Un•AI•ify has revealed the extent to which leaders around the globe now rely on AI to serve as their emissary. The project has also opened conversations with leaders in the AI detection space, including Pangram.

Philosophy

You learn most from direct experience, where decisions carry consequences and expose you to both upside and downside. Nassim Taleb calls this skin in the game.

NTEXT.co is shaped by years of building where the market could respond: publications, communities, tools, essays, campaigns, websites, and narrative systems. Building in public, similar to running barefoot, maximizes feedback. It is a no-BS way to learn.

Similarly, the NTEXT approach begins with the primacy of proof: observe what people actually say and do, build from the signal, publish or ship, watch what happens, and refine. It is a practical way to learn. And it is also a practical way to build products and marketing that are useful, authoritative, and hard to ignore.

Implode-O-Meter BirthdayShoes Exec on the Desk Un•AI•ify