Jacob Sheldon’s Portfolio

Marketplace product roadmap creation, prioritization, and implementation

When I joined Hohm, the solar installations marketplace supported over 100 installations per month 100% manually by an operations team that was struggling to cope, resulting in a degraded customer experience.

In this time:

• I started on a contract basis, after a month I was transitioned into an employee, and after 4 more months I became the manager of a 9-person cross-functional team.
• I became an expert on the marketplace’s operations, developed a product roadmap around a service strategy, and acted as the scrum master and product owner in an agile scrum environment.
• Given the high operational demands and limited capacity of the business, I created a prioritization strategy based on the specific needs of each department and the potential time savings for operations.
• Resulted in an operations time savings of over 50% per installation in 9 months.

Document management system

• Overview: System to ensure compliance from internal teams and installer partners. Consisting of internal and external-facing user interfaces, document rejection functionality, and progress tracking on a per-installation basis.
• Results: 13.5k documents processed for 1100 installations, 1500 documents rejected.
• Built with: Airtable, Softr, Javascript.

Inventory management system, automated stock allocation

• Overview: System to reduce operations workload and time-to-procure stock while improving the time-to-revenue. Consisting of stock availability tracking, stock purchasing functions, internal user interfaces, a supplier-facing portal, and automated stock allocation on a per-installation basis.
• Results: 3000 stock units worth over $1m processed automatically in 9 months.
• Built with: Airtable, Softr, Javascript.

Work order platform

• Overview: Scalable platform to control costs and reduce project budget overruns. Consisting of a service provider portal, e-sign functionality, status tracking, action items, invoicing, and admin functionality.
• Results: 600 work orders processed resulting in gross margin increase of over 10%.
• Built with: Airtable, Softr, Javascript.

Airtable <> HubSpot CRM 2-way sync

• Overview: Durable bidirectional syncing allows automations and multiple business functions to work seamlessly across two separate systems. Consists of 100 properties within two databases, data cleaning, formatting, 40 triggers, and limitations to prevent infinite loops.
• Results: 10k property value changes sync per month. Brought error rate from 8% to 0.2% in 2 months.
• Built with: Airtable, HubSpot, Javascript, REST API.

Marketplace reporting dashboard

• Overview: Interface accessible by the team and management to track the performance of the marketplace. Developed a list of metrics to track based on business goals, product strategy, and operational challenges. Consists of formulas and conditional filtering to output each metric. Required data tracking set up for new metrics within multiple systems and consolidated into one.
• Results: Reports on 26 metrics in real-time that are used weekly in company-wide meetings.
• Built with: Airtable, HubSpot, Softr, Javascript.

AI product recommender

• Overview: Search tool utilizing OpenAI models to provide product recommendations to customers. Developed out of consistent customer requests for a clearer way to search through a large list of 300+ product offerings.
• Results: Utilized by 2200 users with an increase in engagement by 232%.
• Built with: JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, Heroku, Supabase with pgvector, GPT-4, Embedding-3.

Product demo → link

Shiny Marketplace

• Overview: Platform to connect startups with a fragmented market of freelancing executives. Consists of candidate vetting, employer and candidate accounts, job postings, pre-structured job applications, invoicing, and payment processing.
• Results: Enabled $1m in freelancer earnings, 50 placements, and 400 vetted & onboarded freelancers.
• Built with: React, NodeJS, Python, AWS, Heroku, MongoDB, Stripe Connect, Plaid.

Pivot from Fractional CFOs to Fractional Executives

• While supporting fractional CFOs, we received interest from companies to hire fractionally for other C-level roles.
• I analyzed the market to weigh the two potential business strategies of horizontal expansion versus vertical expansion.
• Quickly launched an experiment to gauge the interest of candidates via a waitlist. The success metric was 100 waitlist sign-ups within 6 weeks, which was surpassed by 36%.
• I drove the expansion of the marketplace to 3 more roles and methodically rolled out the new roles to the waitlist alongside a company rebrand.

Job postings with indexing on Google Jobs

• Overview: Regional job postings and integration into the Google Indexing API for visibility on Google Jobs to drive organic sign-ups of candidates on Shiny’s waitlist.
• Results: 5000 waitlist sign-ups, surpassing 350 per month.
• Built with: WordPress, WP Job Manager, Google Indexing API

Slice Capital Platform

• Overview: Equity crowdfunding platform connecting startups with everyday investors, allowing non-accredited investors to invest in private startups and startups to raise funds via newly legalized means.
• Results: 1000 users onboarded and approved. 200 company applications processed.
• Built with: React, NodeJS, GraphQL, AWS, Heroku, Stripe Connect, Plaid.

KYC/AML - Example of product roadmap prioritization

• Upon taking over the product roadmap, I audited the product and read through the regulations the business needed to comply with to identify compliance shortfalls.
• Developed a new 3-month roadmap to prioritize KYC/AML implementation, a required compliance feature, via integration with Alloy ahead of requested growth-enabling functionality.
• The successful implementation of this feature was pivotal in ensuring our compliance and played a critical role in our passing a FINRA inspection 2 months later.