Why I Started This Practice

A founder I spoke with last month had five tools open on his second monitor: Stripe, HubSpot, GA4, Mixpanel, and a Google Sheet a contractor maintained on Fridays. Each one told him a slightly different story about the same week. None of them agreed on revenue. None of them agreed on which channel drove the customers he liked best.

He had hired a contractor to “fix the data.” Three months in, he had a dashboard nobody opened and a Slack channel where the same questions came up every week.

That’s the gap I built this practice for.

The shape of the problem

Series A SaaS companies hit a specific wall around 25–50 people. Product-market fit is real. Money is in the bank. Paid acquisition is spending. And the numbers stop being legible.

The wall has three layers, and they stack:

1. Data fragmentation. Five tools, five different stories. Nobody owns reconciliation, so nobody trusts the totals.
2. Signal distrust. The dashboard says one thing, the team’s gut says another. When they disagree, the gut wins. Then the dashboard becomes furniture.
3. Decision blindness. Real capital calls — channel spend, hiring, feature bets — get made on inputs nobody believes. The cost shows up two quarters later, in churn, runway, and a board meeting that gets uncomfortable.

The third one is the expensive one. The first two are the cause.

What “fixing it” actually looks like

It isn’t a dashboard. A dashboard is an output. If the inputs underneath it disagree, a prettier dashboard makes the disagreement easier to see, not easier to solve.

It’s also rarely a data warehouse. Most Series A teams who think they need a warehouse don’t, yet. They need someone to sit with their Stripe export, their CRM, their event stream, and their billing edge cases for a week and figure out why the numbers don’t tie.

The work is closer to forensics than engineering. You find the three places where revenue is being counted differently. You pick one definition and write it down. You build the smallest pipeline that produces that one number, end to end, with everyone on the team able to trace it back to source. Then the dashboard is honest, and the board meeting is defensible.

After that, you can build the rest of the stack. But the order matters.

Why I do this freelance

A full-time hire at this stage is hard to justify. The work isn’t 40 hours a week of net-new dashboards — it’s a focused stretch of cleanup, then a steady drumbeat of small projects: an attribution audit, a churn model, an experiment that needs a real readout.

That shape is the wrong shape for a salary, and the right shape for fractional work with someone senior enough to make the calls. That’s the gap I’m here to fill.

The promise

You walk out of an engagement with one number you can defend in a board meeting. Then another. Then the muscle to keep them honest as the business changes underneath them.

That’s the whole thing.