What My Day Job Actually Is (And Why It’s Not All of Me)
The short version (and the real one)
People ask what I do for a living and I give them the short version: I lead a team of Pendo consultants who help B2B SaaS companies make sense of their product data. Then I watch their eyes glaze over, because most people have never heard of Pendo (a product analytics and in-app guide platform most SaaS teams already own and barely use).
Here’s the real version. I spent more than a decade inside B2B SaaS companies, from early stage startups to a Fortune 10, before I built Deliberate Signals. The problem I kept running into was always the same one: teams had the data, they just didn’t trust it, or didn’t know what to do with it once they had it.
The work, in plain terms
Most companies buy Pendo expecting clarity and get chaos instead: inconsistent tagging, dashboards nobody opens, product decisions made on gut feel because the “real” numbers are a mess. We fix that, and the process looks the same for nearly every client:
- A 13 point audit of the existing Pendo setup
- A 90 day roadmap built around one North Star metric
- Guides launched as A/B tested experiments, not guesses
- Ongoing partnership once the machinery is running
That’s it. No slide deck, no framework named after a Greek letter.
Proof, not promises
I could tell you it works. I’d rather show you.
At Vertical IQ, an industry intelligence SaaS company, we rebuilt onboarding and cut time to reach core product value from 6.3 days to under a day, an 86% faster time to value for new users. Their Director of Product, Drake Branson, put it plainly: “Deliberate Signals brought the Pendo expertise and onboarding experience we needed to accelerate execution with confidence. They filled a critical gap and helped us get it right the first time.”
At ShootProof, a photography SaaS platform, Pendo guided onboarding took first week activation from 25% to 34%, a 36% lift in 60 days, while protecting $4.3M in payment volume during a migration that could not afford to go sideways.
That second one lands different for me. I spent ten years as a wedding photographer before I ever touched Pendo, and there’s something satisfying about watching those two worlds touch.
Why I built it this way
Deliberate Signals crossed $100K in ARR in its first year, entirely on referrals. I’ve spoken at Pendomonium. None of that happened because we’re the loudest name in Pendo consulting online. It happened because the work holds up when people check.
If you’re evaluating Pendo, or you already have it and don’t trust what it’s telling you, that’s exactly who we help. That free strategy call happens with me or someone on my team. Thirty minutes, no deck, no pitch.
But it’s not the whole story
Here’s the part I actually wanted to write this post to say.
Deliberate Signals is genuinely cool work. I get to solve real problems for real teams, I get paid to do it, and some days I still can’t believe that counts as a job. But it’s not who I am. It’s what I do with a portion of my time and attention, the same as photography is, the same as being a dad is.
I spent a long stretch of my life letting my work answer the question “who am I.” It wasn’t a good answer. It was just the loudest one in the room. This time I’m trying to build something good without asking it to carry more than a job should carry.
Deliberate Signals is going to be part of my life going forward, not my whole life, and certainly not my identity.
If you’re a SaaS team stuck on the problem I described up top, I’d like to help. Book a free strategy call with me or someone on my team, and let’s look at your setup together.