Buying the missing step in the funnel.

Bet

Our portfolio needed a way for customers to send outreach. Mailead was a small cold-email product whose founders had struggled with customer acquisition. I evaluated whether our distribution and engineering capabilities made it a better fit for us than its existing results suggested.

The decision was about fit: an engaged community and marketing partners could help with distribution, while our Bubble engineering experience matched the product's stack. Buying it would still require work on scale, email costs, and the customer experience.

What I Did

I interviewed the founders, examined the build, identified scaling risks, and developed the integration roadmap. After the acquisition, I worked with the original founder-engineers to prioritize activation failures, support issues, email warmup, and infrastructure.

They initially favored new features. I brought customer failures, support requests, launch dates, and risk into shared prioritization sessions. We agreed to fix the foundation, launch to our own community, learn from those customers, and then expand through marketing partners.

Outcome

My historical work records put the purchase at approximately $58K and revenue over the following 12 months at approximately $650K. The revenue figure is not a sale price or a profit calculation.

The original founders began accepting the shared roadmap and proposing features aligned with the strategy. The lesson I took from the experience was that a sound product decision also needs trust: show the evidence, explain the risks, and involve the people who will build it.

Product and Evidence

Visit Mailead for the product. This account draws on my acquisition notes and stakeholder interview story. Financial figures are approximate historical figures from those records; the underlying financial statements are not published here.