Ryan James

WAYV’s mission was to streamline the B2B supply chain in cannabis. I was the third employee hired at the company and was tasked with taking the MVP and building it in a way that digitized the entire workflow of the B2B supply chain. I was able to execute on creating a new efficient process for distribution centers, brands, and retailers to move products. This was supported by an open web marketplace and an ERP/WMS web platform accompanied by a mobile app that allowed ease of use for all workers in the supply chain.

Gold is a Better Way was a concept of the CEO at Advantage Gold. He had a vision of curating a web experience to their niche market of baby boomers while making it easier for his brokers to close deals.

I was involved from concept to launch over an 18-month period. By talking with numerous investors and trying to sell precious metals, I could gather an expert-level opinion on how disconnected the market was for this investment class. This web platform gives an education-first approach to any potential investor. It points out only the most important aspects that would allow any investor to decide on whether precious metals are for your portfolio or not.

One of the best parts was our ability to connect our users’ interaction to our sales pipeline. We tailor notifications to the brokers so they know the optimal time to call a potential client and what they had been interested in on the website. I also helped the CEO with his book’s design and typesetting that became a USA Today and Wall Street Journal bestseller.

Smartmatic is building a digital election product for the County of Los Angeles in the state of California. As the principal product manager, I was a high-level contributor to the product strategy as well as leading the engineering, design, and QA teams on the project.

The eCommerce site is what generated all of our traffic and revenue. In an effort to grow the business, I did some discovery and experimentation with our users. My findings and validation revealed our retail and brand users wanted to have more promotional options to sell more inventory.

Once validated, I worked on defining a promotional/discount module. We started to offer additional services for web banner creation and offing a marketing add-on to take advantage of the promotions campaign manager. Pricing for these services was unique because it was the cannabis industry, and most of the brands we worked with were mid-market brands.

Since most low-end web design is around $2,500, we offered marketing packages between $2,500-$10,000. A $10,000 package was for a 3-month term of campaigns with unlimited asset creation.

These promotional campaigns led to a new revenue stream in asset creation and increased sales revenue through the eCommerce marketplace. The underlining element was not to collect more data on what type of promotions are being run, most effective, and sales on which product sold through the quickest once the promotion was added.