Aleph · 2025–present · founder

Founding a SaaS for the sourcer I used to be.

I founded Aleph Co. to ship the compliance platform US importers should have had in 2024 — FDA FSVP, CPSIA/CPC, California Prop 65, and multi-state PFAS in one workflow. The reason I knew the gap was real: fifteen years sourcing products at YETI, Cheng Loong (Shanghai), and AT&T Wireless. Across every one of those roles, the through-line was the same — regulatory compliance was a disaster and everyone pretended it wasn't.

In the last three years, FDA FSVP enforcement got real. CPSIA penalties for children's products stopped being theoretical. California Prop 65 letters became a cottage industry. Multi-state PFAS laws arrived with different deadlines in each jurisdiction. Importers were hit with $100K+ penalties for documentation failures that were genuinely invisible under the workflows most companies had.

The software landscape had two bad options: legal-services firms selling hour-based consulting (slow, not scalable), or generic compliance SaaS built for public companies (overkill, expensive, nothing to do with how an importer actually operates). There was a gap for product-shaped software built from the importer's real workflow.

I started Aleph Co. and we shipped Aleph into that gap. The judgment was sequencing: build FSVP first because it's the most technical and has the sharpest enforcement gradient; add CPSIA/CPC next because children's-product importers are the most pain-aware buyers; Prop 65 and PFAS on top, because once the audit framework exists, each new regulation is an incremental module rather than a rebuild.

What we'd do differently. We originally shipped under the name "FSVP Pro" — accurate for v1, but too narrow. Rebranding to Aleph Co. mid-build cost weeks we didn't need to spend. We should have named it for the shape of the platform, not the shape of the first module.

Gannett / USA Today Network (LocaliQ) · 2022–2024 · Senior PM

Taking a scheduling product from concept to shipped inside a media company.

LocaliQ (Gannett's SMB marketing arm inside the USA Today Network) had a portfolio of point solutions for small businesses — websites, SEO, ads, social — but no scheduling. Our customers were losing appointments to competitors who had a booking tool.

As Senior PM, I led Scheduling from conception to deployment — but the work was a pod effort. We owned product strategy, roadmap, and discovery together, with engineering, design, QA, and Customer Success in lockstep.

The biggest judgment call was what to build first. Engineering wanted AI-driven scheduling rules and advanced routing; internal stakeholders wanted feature parity with Calendly. We pushed back on both: SMB customers had an integration problem, not a sophistication problem. Calendar sync (Google + Outlook) and SMS notifications were the two things they couldn't live without — and the two things most competitors' free tiers hid behind a paywall. We shipped those first and held everything else.

4,900 free accounts and 400+ paid in year one — against an internal plan that projected meaningfully smaller numbers. In the same window, I picked up product ownership of LocaliQ's SEO offerings and its GenAI tooling.

What we'd do differently. We held AI features too long. By Q4 of year one, prospects evaluating competing tools were asking about GenAI scheduling rules and assistant handoff — we'd deprioritized it correctly for v1 but kept deprioritizing it after we shouldn't have. We'd start that track sooner in v2.

The Thirsty Pig · 2026 rebuild · solo

Reviving 17 years of food and travel writing.

The Thirsty Pig is my food and travel blog. I launched it in 2007 on Blogger, moved to WordPress twice, and ran it across three domains (thirstypig.com, thethirstypig.com, blog.thethirstypig.com) for fifteen years before all three went dark when a hosting migration went sideways. Seventeen years of writing, thousands of posts, mostly offline. 1,649 Instagram posts sat in a data export nobody could search.

I rebuilt the whole thing in early 2026 as a Python + Astro project. The scraper side pulled 923 unique blog posts from the Wayback Machine across three domains — deduplicating 228 exact + 10 fuzzy matches — and recovered images at wildly different rates per platform (Blogspot: ~98% thanks to Google's CDN; legacy WordPress uploads: ~45%; recent wp.com-hosted images: ~1%, because Photon wasn't archived). The Instagram side imported the full JSON export, recovered posts with epoch-0 timestamps via media-level metadata, and preserved captions, hashtags, and GPS. I geocoded 1,000+ addresses via the Foursquare Places API.

The output is 2,900+ pages — posts, categories, search, maps, and best-of — rendered through Astro with Tina CMS for Git-backed editing. 7,500+ images and 213 videos, all self-hosted.

What I'd do differently. I started with the Wayback scrape. The Instagram import would have delivered 60% of the user-facing value in 30% of the total work. I'd flip the order.