Market Presence Rebuild

01 — The Problem

Trendency was a small startup with software that tracked how people's opinions change over time. People called it fascinating. They didn't buy it. The company was spread across three separate websites, had no marketing team, and was up against survey firms that had been around for decades. I came in as marketing director.

02 — The Gap

The big survey companies drop a report on your desk every month, charge you for it, and leave you to work out what it means. They could tell you what happened. Nobody could tell you why. Trendency followed the same people over months and let them answer by degrees instead of yes or no, so you could see opinion move as it happened. The product worked. An unknown startup just had no way to prove it.

03 — Making Room

So we made our own proof. Separate from my day-to-day job, I pitched and directed a study that followed more than 7,200 people over time on disability and workplace accommodations. It found that 40% of Americans need accommodations but only 23% are fully served. That gave a new company something no competitor had: its own findings, on a subject I live every day. Communities know when you genuinely understand them versus when you're checking a box: every metric can look clean while the message completely misses reality. The study showed what the software could do, and the line we built around it — More Than Just Data. Engage. Recognize. Adapt. — is still in use. Clients came to include the NFL Players Association, public-sector unions like SEIU and AFSCME, and DC Public Schools.

04 — The Day Job

The marketing director work was the other half. I hired and directed an outside design firm and vendors instead of trying to do it all in-house. Three websites became one. I started a series of articles under the founder's name — the Discovery Gap — that turned dense research into plain language clients could act on, and set a publishing schedule the company hadn't had before.

05 — What Transferred

Trendency was the first time I ran marketing alone, and it taught me that positioning is mostly cutting. Everything the software could do had to fit in one sentence a buyer could act on. I still start there: write the sentence, defend it, and build everything else to support it.