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.

The piece people remember is the mailer. We sent glossy envelopes to business owners, and inside, along with the one-sheet, was 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 whole thing myself, right down to the presorting, the USPS permit, and the trips to the postal hub.

But the mailer was just one piece of a much bigger machine.

I was building the same go-to-market playbook across Santa Clarita, Palmdale, Lancaster, Ventura, and Tacoma at the same time. I bought my first billboards, ran paid social campaigns, staffed a mall kiosk that doubled as an in-mall billboard, organized event sponsorships with a street team, and built co-marketing campaigns with businesses already on the platform.

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.