VALIDATED.CO

Overview

Validated was a seed stage company. When I was approached by one of the founders, they were building a platform that would allow retailers to compensate in-store purchases to assist with validating parking, which is a highly desirable marketing tactic for larger cities. Validated worked with Uber, Lyft, car2go, and city parking administrators, and had the technology to enable these payments for the Portland market.

The issue that needed to be addressed was that the capability of the product team lacked a scalable view of the total addressable market. At the time, they were using seed funding to pay out of pocket for these discounts in a total of five retail shops, using location-based data points to know when users were making a purchase at a single store on their platform. My responsibility included, but was not limited to creating a strategy that would auto-populate every retailer in the Portland metropolitan area, to allow near, immediate, citywide adoption. This strategy led to an extreme overhaul of users and user-generated leads for the sales team to follow up on. In other words, without having a retailer sign up, we allowed all of our users to get parking validated at any retailer that they visited.

We could confirm their location and we could provide the same incentives as though the retailer were a part of our platform. Using this marketing method, we were able to go directly to retailers where we knew that our customers were shopping at, inform them that we had already paid for their customers' parking validation, which allowed the platform to flourish, leading to acceptance into Techstars, as well as a follow-on investment, an acceptance from Jaguar Land Rover. 

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1iAO5DUrshfeixhp6jsoUTegT1q0jL5lk147OoUAVriM/edit?usp=sharing