When you’ve been a public company for almost 15 years, your databases get heavy. We had something like 900,000 contacts in the system: old creator signups, former product users, and plenty of people who had nothing to do with where the business was headed.

We were paying for all of it.

So I built custom filters, dug through the data, and cut the database down to roughly 40,000 contacts that still had a real reason to be there. It saved real money, but more importantly, it gave us a database we could actually work with again. Segmentation got cleaner. Reporting got clearer. The whole system became easier to manage because it finally reflected the business we were actually running.

Then I went after the thing underneath it: attribution.

We had more than fifty lead sources spread across HubSpot and Salesforce. Most were inconsistent. More than half were unused. None of them were trustworthy.

I collapsed them into about a dozen clean sources that rolled up into a handful of meaningful categories. Then I went back through two years of closed deals, one by one, and reassigned each to its true origin.

It was painstaking, forensic work.

I loved it.

The payoff was that we could finally answer a simple question honestly: Where does our business actually come from?

Google Ads? Gated content? Events? Organic search?

You can’t make smart decisions until you can answer that. Now we could.

I also built a Google sheet where you could drop in a Salesforce export and instantly see revenue by lead source.

That spreadsheet was art.

It’s a pattern you’ll see throughout my career. I’m insatiably curious, and I like lifting rocks to see what’s underneath. When I find a problem, I chase it until it’s fixed.