I spent three years selling technical solutions before I ever wrote a line of code.

I started my career as a B2B account executive, closing complex technical deals for operational teams — nearly $2.9M in managed-service contracts in my first year, and Salesman of the Year to show for it. What that job actually taught me had less to do with selling and more to do with listening: stakeholders rarely describe the problem accurately on the first pass, and the difference between a deal that sticks and one that doesn’t usually comes down to whether you found the real need underneath the ask.

A layoff during the pandemic gave me a hard stop to sit with that. I went back to school, picked up software engineering at General Assembly, and started applying the same instinct — find the real problem, then build the thing that solves it — to code instead of contracts. At AudioEye, that meant remediating accessibility issues on production sites for the actual people who hit them. At Sapphire Studios, it meant not trusting my own assumptions about why two platforms serving 5,500 users felt slow: I interviewed and hired a UX researcher to find out, then led the JS-to-HTMX migration her findings pointed to.

When I founded Frontpage, I was the only engineer, which meant there was no layer between me and the people using what I built. I stayed close to our first 50 early users — not through a single big stakeholder meeting, but through the slow, ongoing work of watching what they actually did with the product and shipping toward that instead of a roadmap I’d written in advance.

These days I move between consulting engagements — auditing a sports-betting app’s subscriber funnel for DubClub, building an agentic demo-generation pipeline for Superstar Agency — but the loop is the same one I learned selling and relearned building: understand the business problem, get close to the people living with it, and ship something that actually holds up.