Matthew Anderson
Verified Expert in Product Management
Product Manager
Mexico City, Mexico
Toptal member since October 7, 2020
Matthew is a 3x startup founder turned product manager with 12 years of startup and corporate innovation experience. As a product leader for companies in different stages and industries, he has worn many hats, from raising capital for his B2C startup to leading a publicly-traded enterprise's B2B offshoot to over $1 million in first-year revenue. Matthew loves the start-to-finish process of creating, scaling, and improving joyful tech products with world-class complete user experiences.
Project Highlights
Expertise
- Business Strategy
- Early-stage Startups
- Entrepreneurship
- Ideation
- Product Leadership
- Product Management
- Product Marketing
- Product Support
Work Experience
Startup Consultant | General Manager
Better Family
- Oversaw business formation from the ideation stage to a successful launch and established product-market fit as the sole full-time operator and primary business strategist.
- Framed the roadmap for one clear high-potential business direction narrowed down from multiple ideas through customer discovery and market analysis.
- Developed the go-to-market strategy, pro forma, and fundraising materials to help raise an $850k pre-product seed round.
- Identified, hired, and managed over 20 contractors and vendors, from branding and third party logistics partners to SEO, marketing, and software developers.
Product Manager
Boardable
- Maintained a 20% conversion rate with a rapidly growing top-of-funnel marketing activity by analyzing free trial customer journeys and creating activity-based user messaging.
- Evaluated and implemented a new development process (Basecamp's Shape Up) for a technical team expanding beyond a technical founder.
- Trained new product support and marketing hires in developer collaboration (ticketing, quality assurance, etc.).
Product Manager
BuySellAds
- Grew to over $1 million in first-year sales as the lead product manager for the beta program of a white-label product for a publicly-traded enterprise client.
- Implemented Kanban development practice as the sole product manager on a fully remote team of about ten engineers.
- Started regular collaboration between product, marketing, sales, and support teams to break communication silos effectively.
Startup Consultant
DeveloperTown
- Created the sprint-to-market process for rapid new venture ideation and market testing. Validated go-to-market strategies for the successful initial launch.
- Led consulting for clients ranging from established large enterprises to independent founders.
- Executed paid digital advertising tests to validate product value propositions, brand strategies, and go-to-market strategies.
Founder | CEO
Adproval
- Grew to a marketplace of approximately 3,000 social media influencers and 100 active brands/marketers.
- Interviewed, hired, and managed our team, which ranged from four to six employees.
- Raised several hundred thousand dollars in growth capital as the sole founder after reaching bootstrapped sustainability.
Project History
Adproval Influencer and Brand Marketplace
Sole founder/CEO of startup leading design, development, and growth to thousands of users for one of the first brand and influencer marketing marketplaces.
Adproval began in 2011 by manually working with influential lifestyle bloggers to help monetize their sites by working directly with well-aligned brands. This turned into the ultimate design for Adproval to grow into one of the first self-service marketplaces for influencer marketing.
As the sole founder, I was responsible for product ideation, go-to-market strategy, design and development oversight, fundraising, customer support, digital marketing, and growth. Adproval reached thousands of active influencers and over one hundred active brands on our self-service marketplace platform.
Self-Service Platform for Enterprise Client
Led a team of three developers and one designer to build and support a white-label self-serve solution for an enterprise client that topped $1 million in first-year transactions.
The self-service platform allowed brands to make direct purchases of over-the-top media advertisements. Self-service buys ranged between $5,000 to $100,000.
The main challenge was to coordinate communication and development rhythms between our internal team (who was doing the heavy lifting) and the enterprise client (who needed to communicate up their organization for buy-in). This was solved by regimenting and managing a development system and communication cadence that created the visibility our client needed into our progress without burdening our development team with excessive red tape.
Education
Bachelor's Degree in Entrepreneurship and Corporate Innovation, Business Management, and International Business
Indiana University - Bloomington, Indiana
Certifications
Product Leadership Certificate
Product School
Full-stack Web Development
Ironhack
Skills
Tools
Pencil & Paper, Slack, Zoom, Basecamp, Jira, Pivotal Tracker
Paradigms
Agile Product Management, Marketplace Platforms, B2B2C, B2C, Business to Business to Consumer (B2B2C)
Industry Expertise
High-tech Startups, Fine Arts
Platforms
Shopify
Other
Google Sheets, Entrepreneurship, Web Entrepreneurship, Business Management, Innovation, Product Support, B2B Product Management, Product Management, Lean Product Manager, SaaS Product Management, Customer Support, Product Owner, Product Ownership, Ideation, Ideation Workshops, Product Strategy, Product Strategy Consultant, Digital Marketing Strategy, Leadership, Consulting, Technology Consulting, Product Leadership, Startups, Early-stage Startups, Startup Consulting, Startup Growth Strategy Development, eCommerce, Product Discovery, SaaS, Intercom, Computer Skills, Business Strategy, Lean, Product Marketing, SaaS Product Marketing, Customer Journey, Customer Analysis, Customer Success, Advertising, Digital Advertising, Client Management, Client Reporting, Backlog Grooming, Backlog Management, Analytics, Market Strategy and Research Product Manager, User Research, Go-to-market Plans, UX Testing, Value Proposition, Web Development, CEO, Lean Startups, Startup Funding, Two-sided Marketplaces, Two-sided Communities, B2B, Growth, Client Relations, Client Relationship Management, Media, Prototyping, Email Marketing, Metabase, Finance, Accounting, React, Vue, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Ruby on Rails (RoR), Hiring, Management, PageFly, Ahrefs, Google Search Console, Team Leadership, MVP Design, Product Launch, Launch Strategy
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