The one where the P&L was mine.
A B2B marketplace for the technical vetting and algorithmic matching of marketing technology experts. Built from concept, bootstrapped — no outside money to hide behind — to acquisition by IDX in 2023. Every unit-economics decision was one I had to live with.
Why this is on the list
Not as an exit story. As the reason I hold the P&L view in every engagement since.
Bootstrapped means the economics were never abstract. There was no runway to absorb a pricing mistake or a segment that lost money quietly. Every decision about what to charge, who to serve and what it cost to serve them landed on a P&L I owned personally.
I built the systems, not just the strategy. The matching and vetting engine the marketplace ran on was something I built, because in a bootstrapped company the person who can see the problem is the person available to fix it. That is still how I work.
Marketplaces punish you for ignoring either side. Supply without demand is a cost centre; demand without supply is churn. You learn quickly that the whole lifecycle is one system, which is the thing most operators only ever see half of.
What I built and ran
Technical vetting and algorithmic matching. The systems that decided who was good enough to be on the platform and who they were put in front of — which is where a marketplace either earns trust or loses it. These cut time-to-hire by 40%.
The full P&L. Pricing, take rate, cost to serve, and the segment-level view of which business was worth having. The unfashionable half of the job and the one that decided whether the company survived.
A team of seven. Small enough that everyone's work was visible, large enough that the operating cadence had to be deliberate rather than ambient.
The acquisition handover. Led it through to close with 100% organisational continuity — no one lost, nothing dropped. Handing over a business so it keeps running without you is the same discipline as handing over a system.
What it means for the work I do now
I've been in the seat you're hiring for. Not adjacent to it, not advising it. The judgement calls a founder is making — whether to fix pricing or the funnel, whether a segment is worth keeping, when to stop building and start selling — are ones I've made with my own money on the line.
I'll tell you when the problem isn't the funnel. Most people brought in on a revenue problem are incentivised to find a revenue-shaped answer. Having run a P&L, I'll say when it's actually pricing, or cost to serve, or a segment you should stop selling to.
Handover is a discipline, not a courtesy. The acquisition ran with full organisational continuity because it was documented and designed to survive the founder leaving. Every engagement I run ends the same way.
The credential that matters here isn't the exit. It's that I've owned a P&L end to end in a business with no outside money — so when I tell you your best-selling segment is losing money, or that the problem is your pricing rather than your pipeline, that's a judgement I've had to make about my own company, not a framework I read.
Someone who has run one will tell you when it's the P&L, not the funnel.
Thirty minutes. No brief required. We'll work out where your customer lifecycle is losing money and whether it's a problem I can fix — and if it isn't a fit, I'll tell you inside the first ten minutes.