Valevo was a loyalty app built around a simple idea: businesses pay for your attention, and some of that value should come back to you. As Director of Growth and Acquisition, my job was to get people downloading the app and businesses joining the network, one market at a time.

Every city needed its own playbook.

Some ideas scaled. Others were specific to the local market. We bought billboards, ran paid social campaigns, staffed mall kiosks that doubled as giant advertisements, sponsored local events with street teams, and built co-marketing campaigns with businesses already on the platform.

One campaign started with a $2 bill.

We mailed glossy envelopes to business owners, each containing a one-sheet and a real $2 bill. The medium was the message: we want your attention. You just gave it to us. Here’s two dollars. I ran the campaign end to end, right down to the USPS permit, presorting the mail, and driving everything to the postal hub.

One of my favorite experiments was an Uber driver referral program. We printed branded seat-back signs with unique QR codes for each driver, then I recruited the drivers the old-fashioned way by chatting them up during rides I was already taking.

Looking back, I wasn’t just running campaigns. I was building a repeatable playbook for launching marketplaces, taking what worked in one city and improving it in the next.