Dave's Resume
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Herald API
Herald builds digital infrastructure for commercial insurance, allowing developers to quote and bind insurance from multiple carriers through a single API.
Project Name |
Key Objective |
Outcome |
Director of ProductMarch 2022 - Current |
  |   |
Time To Integrate (time for customer to integrate with our API)TTI |
Reduced time to integrate by 4 weeks |
|
Acquisition |
Acquired enterprise customers with 10X volume |
Thimble
Thimble is an InsurTech startup backed by IAC and Slow Ventures, listed as Fast Company's #1 "Small And Mighty" Innovative Companies of 2021.
Project Name |
Key Objective |
Outcome |
Director of ProductMarch 2021 - March 2022 |
  |   |
Conversion |
Increased conversion by 27% |
|
Gross Written PremiumGWP |
Developed Special Event Insurance |
|
Product ManagerApril 2019 - March 2021 |
  |   |
Acquisition |
$0 CAC, Growing 80% MoM |
|
Acquisition |
7,000 agents, 10% of all customer acquisition |
|
Acquisition |
400% return on spend |
|
Acquisition |
Partnership with Angi's and Peerspace |
|
Gross Written PremiumGWP |
204% increase in annualized revenue |
Created the Certificate Manager, a free compliance manager
Role
Product Manager
Key Objective
Skills
Outcome
$0 CAC, Growing 80% MoM
Summary
The Thimble Certificate Manager is my passion project, which started my career in product. Data showed over 40% of our customers only purchased insurance because they were required to, and the people requiring insurance had a ton of struggles managing compliance.
Approving contractors for work while limiting risk is an ongoing struggle throughout multiple industries. Studies show that property managers spend up to 10% of their time collecting Certificate's, waiting for changes, and verifying renewals. Some corporations are beginning to move to a digital process, but at an incredibly high cost that small businesses cannot afford.
The Thimble Certificate Manager’s core product is a solution to all of these problems, at no cost. Key features include:
- Automated communications - Hassle-proof automated emails and reminders to contractors
- Easy COI Reader - Key information extracted from COIs, side by side with your requirements
- Auto-approved policies - Policies for contractors sold directly by Thimble, guaranteed to meet your minimums
- Policy status dashboard - A bird’s eye view of who’s working where, with expiration notifications
How does this benefit Thimble? By offering a free compliance manager to these companies, every contractor and vendor they manage becomes an unpaid lead. And not just any lead, these contractors are actively being requested to provide proof of insurance in order to start work. Our strongest value prop is the ability to sell a policy with all of the insurance requirements pre-selected, making Thimble the obvious choice when buying a policy. Even contractors who upload their own policies become extremely qualified lead on the day their policy is expiring (which we require them to provide 😎 ).
After coming up with the idea I designed the entire platform, worked with 4 engineers to develop it, created the go-to-market strategy, and launched a CRM flow to encourage the people hiring our customers to sign up. So far the Certificate Manager has over 1,000 users and has acquired customers at a $0 Customer Acquisition Cost, growing 80% MoM.
Certificate Manager Transactions by Month
Since launch, transactions attributed to Certificate Manager users have been growing at an average rate of 80%.
Explainer Video
Many of our target industries are unfamiliar with a compliance manager that also offers and insurance solution, and have trouble understanding the concept. After collecting this feedback, we decided to create an explainer video to use in marketing, CRM, and onboarding.
Launched Herald API Docs and interactive guides
Role
Director of Product
Key Objective
Skills
Outcome
Decreased Customer-Integration Time by 4 Weeks
Summary
As an early stage company, it’s fundamental to our growth to launch with new customers quickly to drive activity. At the end of Q1, our average time-to-integrate was 12 weeks, far behind what we needed to reach our usage targets. I prioritized our Q2 roadmap to emphasize ease of use, focusing on solutions to help developers integrate with our API quickly rather than launching new features.
After some research, we found that the biggest contributing factor to our integration time was the need for developers to reach out to our customer success team to answer specific questions, rather than issues with our actual API design. Many of our customers have offshore engineering teams, so receiving an answer for a single question could take an entire day. The key project for Q2 was to launch Herald Docs, a documentation hub that walks developers through our API’s core concepts, nuances, and step-by-step guides to integrating with each endpoint.
I created our Docs in Webflow, with a structured side-bar and search functionality. All in all, I wrote more than 20 docs for our core endpoints with an emphasis on the most common questions our customer success team received. The insurance industry is far behind the times regarding technology, and our docs have set us apart from what developers at InsureTech companies are used to. We’ve received raving reviews from developers, citing our docs as the best in the insurance industry and on par with the pioneers of API documentation like Stripe and Plaid. Our following 3 customers integrated in an average time of 6 weeks.
Links
Example doc with Sample Requests
Each doc contains example API calls, highlighting the core keys and values being sent. Guides, like this, also contain the table of contents to walk through each step.
Example doc with illustrative flows
For more complex concepts, I created illustrative diagrams to simplify the concept before reading the full doc. These have been most helpful for non-engineers, mainly our customers' PMs.
Expanded API offering to include third-party files, classification search, and producer management
Role
Director of Product
Key Objective
Skills
Outcome
Acquired enterprise customers with 10X volume
Summary
When I first started at Herald in March 2022, we had just launched our core product. Herald is building an all-in-one API to allow platforms to build Broker SaaS and Quoting engineers, accessing multiple carriers through a single API. Our core product was the ability to get quotes from multiple carriers. After expanding our quoting API to support additional carriers, we began losing potential customers for our lack of additional touchpoints.
After focusing our Q2 roadmap on ease-of-use (see Project Summary about Herald Docs), I planned our Q3-Q4 roadmap to focus strictly on expanding our features throughout the policy lifecycle.
We prioritized this list based on customer demand, and launched 3 new touchpoints in the policy life cycle in 5 months.
Search (Classifications):
Our /classifications endpoint allows customers to get over 20,000 professions to classify an applicant, each of which is mapped to each individual carrier's classification system. In order to support front-end classification experiences, we offer a query for search, limiting the amount of results, and pagination.
Files:
The /files endpoint allows customers to get metadata for an individual file, as well as getting a temporary link to stream the contents of a file. Carriers can offer multiple files to accompany a quote, from a sample insurance policy to a PDF report of a company's potential cyber risk. We integrated with multiple carrier APIs to download and host these files ourselves for each quote, making them accessible through a single API.
Producers:
Our /producers endpoint allows customers to create insurance producers, which can then be given access to insurance products using our /connections endpoint. Only licensed insurance producers can sell a carrier's products, so our connections API allows for existing producers to connect to individual products, with each product requiring a unique set of producer authentication values.
Mockup of how we encourage customers to use our Classifications API
Our classifications API allows customers to use a search query for individual professions to get back a list of relevant insurance classifications. Each of these classifications is then mapped to each individual carrier's system for classifying an applicant.
Announcement for our Connection and Producers API release.
Our connections API allowed for customers to grant product access to individual producers, which was previously done manually by carriers.
Optimized the end-to-end web funnel experience
Role
Product Manager
Key Objective
Skills
Outcome
Increased conversion by 27%
Summary
In 2021 Thimble launched three new insurance products which added additional steps to the funnel, more sophisticated underwriting, and increased pricing. These new products improved our unit economics, but at the cost of our conversion. After dropping by 22% in the first month, I was assigned the task of optimizing conversion.
I dedicate one week to data analysis and research, creating Amplitude dashboards with high-level conversion and a detailed funnel analysis, watching FullStory sessions, and calculating the tradeoff between higher conversion and higher order value. There were 2 primary points of drop-off, and clear patterns in FullStory that showed where users are struggling. I created an experiment roadmap, top heavy with the low hanging fruit that we could implement quickly while beginning to develop more drastic changes. Each experiment was slated to run in 2 week intervals with a week to review data and discuss next steps as a team.
One of the most impactful experiments was focused on allowing cost-conscious customers to purchase low premium policies. Our traditional General Liability policies are available by the hour, day, or month, which is our strongest differentiator from competitors. Unfortunately due to regulatory restrictions, these new coverage were only available for long term policies. In an effort to increase Average Order Value, we launched these new products by asking users to select their coverages, and then displayed the durations available to them. Naturally, many customers opted to include all available coverages before becoming frustrated that they did not have the option to buy a short-term policy.
The experiment was to give users the option to select their duration up front, while highlighting the value of long-term policies that offer additional coverages. This would allow us to increase conversion of users looking for 1 day policies while still acquiring larger policies. This experiment successfully increased conversion by 21% with only a 1% drop in Average Order Value, ultimately increasing revenue by 18%. Only one of eight experiments was unsuccessful and overall conversion has increased by 27%.
Overall conversion from start to purchase over time
When we launched 3 new insurance products which included additional questions and higher prices, conversion tanked. A month after, I put together a roadmap of 8 optimization experiments to run in 2 week intervals. 7/8 experiments increased conversion, ending in a 27% increase.
Highest performing experiment
Adding this step in the funnel converted more customers that were interested in purchasing low-premium policies, but the strong value propositions prevented a large dip in high-premium policies.
Managed the creation and growth of the broker program
Role
Product Manager
Key Objective
Skills
Outcome
7,000 agents, 10% of all customer acquisition
Summary
On paper I became a Product Manager in August of 2020, but I had been acting as a Product Manager for the Broker Program since May 2019. Our head of Business Development’s first priority was to create a Broker Program- a network of Independent Agents throughout the country who would sell Thimble policies to their clients.
The MVP we developed was a Broker Portal with the ability to send your clients an email with a referral link, a table to track commissions, and the ability to add ACH information to receive commissions monthly. On the day of launch, I sent cold email campaigns to a list of Independent Agents we had purchased. We monitored open rates and sign ups, discovering that cold email campaigns converted at a much lower rate than anticipated. We began to partner with platforms that had their own networks, and emails coming from them directly led to much higher conversion.
Now we had a small network of brokers, and the feedback was unanimous: brokers needed the ability to build quotes on their clients behalf. At the time our quoting process was only 4 steps, which we expected the brokers clients to do on their own. After conducting interviews it was clear that the broker < > client relationship was built on trust, and customers trust their broker more than themselves. Launching the ability for brokers to build and share a quote with their clients had a huge impact on the program.
The quote feature increased our broker activation rate (% of brokers with a sale) by more than 120%. Over the next few quarters we focused on developing new features, including:
- Broker Bind - The ability for brokers to purchase a policy on their clients behalf
- Partner Integrations - Allowing brokers to sell Thimble policies from other carrier platforms
- Management features - For brokers to edit, cancel, and extend their clients policies
- Agency Accounts - Allowing agencies with multiple brokers to access a central portal while managing their individual clients
Today the broker program makes up 10% of all new customer acquisition. The average broker policies have 36% more premium than other channels, due to brokers working with larger clients and living off of commissions.
New customers from brokers by quarter
Over the first 2 years of the Broker Program, we've continually launched new features and integrations with new partners to acquire new brokers and keep them more engaged.
Screenshot of the V2 Broker Portal
The revamped broker portal was optimized for engagement, highlighting quotes and commissions for the month to encourage brokers to send more business. We also added a range of client management features for brokers to manage, modify, and cancel their client's policies.
Developed and launched new insurance products
Role
Product Manager
Key Objective
Skills
Outcome
Developed Special Event Insurance
Summary
I owned the development of our Special Events Insurance product. Special events insurance is a specific type of liability insurance that protects you against the risks associated with organizing or participating in a special event, including third-party bodily injury, property damage, and liquor liability.
The first stage involved working with our VP of Insurance and our Actuary to compile a list of event types to insure, establish underwriting guidelines, and develop a pricing model based on risk, number of attendees, event duration and zip code. After defining the product I worked with our UX team to design the flow, and our legal team to ensure that our questions are compliant. After having a final prototype, I assisted the marketing team in performing keyword research based on our target event types for SEO content and performance marketing campaigns.
I worked with our engineering team to build out the flow, develop the pricing logic, and package a final policy with specific forms based on your event type and state. Thimble plans to launch the Special Events product in summer of 2021.
Developed and managed the customer referral program
Role
Product Marketing Manager
Key Objective
Skills
Outcome
400% return on spend
Summary
Creating a customer referral program in the insurance industry involves endless restrictions and limitations. Before defining the program I had to work with our insurance team to compile the rules and regulations of all 50 states, only to find that offering this program in half of them would be a massive success.
Country wide regulations state that only licensed professionals can be incentivized or compensated for the sale of an insurance policy. Then at a state level there are regulations regarding who can and cannot be paid, how much they can be paid, the timeframe over which limits apply, or whether you can do this at all. After building various models and spreadsheets, I identified the least common denominator and defined the program. The Thimble Referral Program would offer a $25 gift card per-referral in 25 states, limited to $50 per calendar year, when a referee becomes an active Thimble user.
I worked with our UX team to design the flow of referring a friend, our Director of CRM to coordinate announcement emails and drip campaigns, and our legal team to create compliant terms and conditions. I created a technical brief for our engineering team to create unique tracking links and attribution logic, define the triggers for a successful referral as well as fraud triggers, and provided instructions to integrate with the Tremendous API to fulfil gift cards.
We have received a 400% return on spend from the referral program. We continually optimized for engagement by adding additional in-app placements, quarterly email blasts, and began filing to offer the program in additional states with stricter regulations. Over 5% of eligible customers have made a referral, and 68% of payouts result in a sale.
Revenue earned / money spent
While some months are better than others, we have never spent more money on our referral program than the premium (revenue) we earn. Our best month delivered more than a 1000% return on spend.
Managed and improved our integrations with platform partners
Role
Product Marketing Manager
Key Objective
Skills
Outcome
Partnership with Angi's and Peerspace
Summary
In an effort to build low-cost acquisition channels, I worked with our VP of Business Development to create an affiliate program. The initial affiliate program allowed platforms to refer their user base to Thimble using a unique link, offering in-depth funnel reporting from site visit to sign up. Since non-licensed businesses cannot earn rewards or commission for the sale of a policy, we had to closely monitor and optimize our signup to purchase rate.
I acted as the point-of-contact for all of our larger partnerships to assist external teams during the integration process, coordinate with marketing teams for launch, and develop our program as tech-heavy requests came in. Some of our most successful partnerships are:
- Angi (formerly Angie's List)- API integration for service providers to buy insurance by-the-project
- Peerspace- In-funnel placement for photographers to purchase insurance immediately after booking a venue
- Homeadvisor- Quarterly placements in newsfeeds and newsletters
- NPP- Integration for logged-in members to purchase insurance
Our customer acquisition cost for the partner channel is 76% less than other paid channels, maintaining a 67% signup to purchase rate.
Signup to Purchase rate from partner traffic
Partners are paid for a referral at signup (account creation) because unlicensed agents cannot be paid for the sale of a policy. Because of that, we had to closely monitor and optimize the signup to purchase rate. The overall rate is 67%, much higher than our other channels which average at about 47%
Peerspace Integration
We partnered with Peerspace, a platform to book venues for events, photoshoots, etc to offer insurance to the users renting the space. Our placement is the first step after confirming a booking.
Led the go-to-market strategy for 4 new insurance products
Role
Product Marketing Manager
Key Objective
Skills
Outcome
204% increase in annualized revenue
Summary
As Product Marketing Manager I was responsible for bringing all new insurance products and features to market. Months before launching new insurance products, I would work with the product and insurance team to create a product guide. A product guide defines:
- The traditional coverage at a high level and what will make Thimble’s product unique
- A Product Definition defining the limits we will offer, bundling restrictions, pricing and rating factors, key coverages and exclusions, and state availability
- The target market as well as a itemized list of approved professions we can insure, with examples of coverage by industry
- Product flow to understand the questions we will ask
- Competitors in the space and our competitive edge
- Key objectives for a successful product launch
After presenting the product guide, I would develop the final go-to-market strategy with a target launch date. I worked with our content team to perform keyword research, assign landing pages and updates to existing content, and request all required content for CRM. I worked closely with our Director of Performance to create campaigns through multiple channels and forecast order value. Finally, I would design and implement measurement methodologies to track the impact of each launch.
As Product Marketing Manager I successfully brought 4 new insurance products and multiple features to market. The combination of Thimble Monthly, Business Equipment Protection, Professional Liability and Annual policies resulted in a 204% increase in annualized revenue.
YoY Revenue
In 2020 we launched Professional Liability, Equipment Protection, and Annual policies which greatly increased Average Order Value on top of attracting a new customer base.