Kareem Mayan

Charitable Impact lets Canadians give to any Canadian charity through a single app. They can give as an individual, as a group, or corporately.

I was hired by Charitable Impact's CEO as the first person on board to validate and then help grow his idea. Over the following seven years, we grew it to 50 employees and $130 million in donations (as of Dec 2019 they're at $530 million).

Along the way, I was sourced and led a dev team of eight. We built and iterated rapidly from a bare-bones MVP to a mature and scalable product.

I worked closely with the CEO on product strategy. I implemented a pragmatic process to ship high-quality software (and iterate along the way). I interviewed customers, built wireframes, worked with designers to translate those into hi-fi mocks, wrote requirements docs, made trade-offs when building features, tested software, triaged bugs, wrote some code, measured and reported on success, and kept stakeholders across the organization up to date on the state of the product.

It was a fruitful and enjoyable engagement for everybody involved.

Predictable Revenue is a leading brand in the SaaS sales enablement space. They help the sales development reps scale prospecting by automating their cold outreach efforts.

I was hired by their CEO to help scale the product and engineering organizations.

He and I worked together to formalize his product strategy and ensure the right product and dev people were in the "right seats on the bus."

On the process side, I worked with the team to ensure they validated wireframes and mockups, incorporated customer feedback to inform product direction, wrote and broke specs down into implementable chunks, and made good trade-offs to build cost-effective solutions.

And I coached a junior product manager and junior dev to help them upskill and grow into their roles.

Here's what their CEO says about our engagement: "Kareem was instrumental in helping us build out our product management organization. He had great insights about our customers after a very short time and was able to show us how to turn those insights into features. He's one of a kind in his ability to see both the product management and the engineering side of the equation. He was an exceptionally valuable member of our team and I hope to work with him again."

SocialWOD helped a CrossFit gym track its members' workouts (a WOD is short for "Workout of the Day" in the CrossFit community).

A gym owner would snap a photo of the whiteboard (where the day's workout and member results were recorded), send it to SocialWOD, and we'd database the data. Gym members would be able to track their workout progress. Gym owners liked it because it both helped retain members (because members could see visible and serious progress) and acquire new customers (because members would share workout progress with their non-member friends via social channels).

Before writing code, we spoke to 30-40 gym owners to validate our understanding of the problem. We showed interviewees wireframes of a potential solution and got eight gym owners to commit to paying. At that point, we built the two-screen MVP.

Over the following three years we scaled SocialWOD to ten employees and contractors across the world and hundreds of customers.

Since it was an early-stage company, I ran product, wrote software, did support, sales, marketing, and customer success.

We sold SocialWOD to a NYC-based company in 2016.

Belmondo Skincare sells natural and organic skincare online and in retail. It's grown revenue year over year since 2010.

It's been carried in places like Urban Outfitters, Anthropologie, and ABC Carpet and Home in NYC. It's been covered in places like Vogue, Elle, Monocle, Wallpaper, ABC, and NBC.

I head up technical and business operations. I built the initial Shopify store. I make all the decisions about what the business needs as it grows and the apps that will support that growth. And I do all the technical implementation to integrate the apps we need. I've also done custom technical work to integrate using Shopify's API when no apps were available.

I've implemented all kinds of marketing apps to grow: reviews, automated emails, SEO, Amazon integration, shipping integrations, product bundling, advanced discounting, reporting, etc.

If you're looking for someone to help implement and grow a Shopify business, I've pretty much seen and done it all over the last decade.

Rock Bottom Bottles sells e-liquid bottles. They approached me because they were experiencing new operational challenges due to growth, and wanted advice and implementation expertise to solve their problems.

I determined their requirements, researched the eCommerce market, and wrote a report outlining possible solutions. The report outlined what their operational future would likely look like if they stayed on WooCommerce as their eCommerce platform vs. moving to Shopify. Specifically, the report covered implementation cost and timeline, potential risks and mitigation strategies, opportunities of using either platform and on-going costs for each platform.

The client decided to re-platform to Shopify. I headed up the project from the product and technical side. I did some of the implementations myself and hired and managed a team to do the rest.

We successfully launched the new site with no technical or revenue bumps in the road. Additionally, I trained up the sales and operational staff so they were familiar with any necessary operational changes.

Replatforming eliminated their operational challenges and positioned them to accelerate their revenue growth after the move to Shopify.