How I got here, and what comes next
There are five chapters. Each one taught me what the next one needed.
The through-line, looking back: getting closer to what makes the buyer act, programmatically. I started by talking to people one-by-one and ended up building the systems that talk to thousands of them at once. The next chapter — the one I'm in now — is closing the loop between writing about the systems and shipping the products that run them.
This is the v1. It's honest about the parts I'm still figuring out.
1. Sales — Verizon and DirecTV
Started on the Verizon sales floor. Then DirecTV doorsteps in the Texas heat. The training was structured — scripts, objection trees, the day-end-recap meeting where the top closer explained why his pitch landed and yours didn't.
Two things stuck. First: the "yes" wasn't the hard part. Keeping the yes — making the buyer comfortable with the decision the day after they signed — was the entire game. Second: every objection I heard a hundred times was a clue that the same sentence, written somewhere upstream, was failing.
I didn't have language for it then, but the door-knock work was the start of the same problem I'd be solving for the next decade: how do you make the message do the work the salesperson does, without being there?
What this taught me: you don't get to skip the human part of buying.
What it set up: the next thing was learning to put the human part on a page.
2. Copy — Flow Motion, Hawke Media
Wrote copy at Flow Motion and then as a Marketing Strategist at Hawke Media. Hand-copied 90 sales letters from the swipe file early on — the Drayton Bird / Halbert / Hopkins canon, plus modern long-form. The discipline of writing them out was the only thing that made the structures stick.
Hawke Media taught me what scale looks like at an agency: dozens of clients, hundreds of variants in flight, the weekly pattern of seeing what worked across thirty different verticals at once.
What this taught me: words on a page are mechanical. You can take them apart and put them back together. The bad copy isn't bad because the writer was untalented; it's bad because the structure was wrong, and the structure can be fixed without changing the topic.
What it set up: copy that sits there is one thing. Copy that travels — to inboxes, to phones — is another.
3. Email — Hawke, Beats by Dre, Red Beard Conversions
Beats by Dre at Apple taught me what scale looks like inside a brand instead of an agency. Then Red Beard Conversions — four years of CRO and retention work for 50+ Shopify DTC brands.
Twillory was the standout retainer. 21 months. Multi-channel revenue ecosystem across email, SMS, and post-purchase (Malomo). $3.25M attributed revenue. The retainer grew from $2K/mo to $8K/mo on results alone, never on a sales call.
Pet Wellness Direct was the lesson in compounding. Four independent automated revenue engines: email ($251K), SMS ($262K), cart upsells ($214K), review-driven revenue ($25K). The systems I built in 2021 were still generating revenue in 2026 with zero maintenance. That's the asset distinction — campaigns spike and die; systems compound.
Total RBC impact: $7.3M+ documented revenue across the book.
What this taught me: the system is the asset.
What it set up: email is a system that lives in someone else's product. The next thing was the page where the conversion happens.
4. Landing Pages — FERMÀT Commerce
Joined FERMÀT Commerce — a $45M Series B commerce platform — as Agency Growth Manager. The brief: build the agency partner program from zero.
In seven months: 2 → 13 partners. $1M+ ARR. NDR consistently above 100%. Zero partner churn. Worked directly with the CEO on go-to-market strategy as the company pivoted from agency-led to enterprise-direct.
The translation from email work was sharper than I expected. A partner program is a landing page for revenue: same architecture, same attention to where the friction is, same compounding logic. Build the asset right and it runs without you.
This was also my first real exposure to the page where the conversion happens — not just the email that drives someone to it. Watching how the FERMÀT product team built the conversion experiences themselves was the first time I really understood the gap between "I know what should be on this page" and "I can build the page." I started closing it.
What this taught me: partnerships are landing pages for revenue. The product behind the page is the other half of the system.
What it set up: to build both halves, I had to learn to ship software.
5. Marketing Engineer — what's next, in public
The "marketing engineer" framing comes from the team at Profound — an AEO/GEO platform — and it captures what every prior chapter was secretly building toward. Someone who builds the marketing systems they write about.
Pronto Conversions is the first product I shipped in this chapter — AI speed-to-lead for pest control and home-services teams. Solo founder + CTO. Stack: Next.js, Twilio, Claude API, Vercel. The system qualifies inbound leads and routes them to the right rep in under 60 seconds.
Revenue Leak Scanner came next — a $7 audit tool that connects Klaviyo and Shopify, surfaces revenue gaps, tells you exactly where to fix them. Same stack. Live on Meta paid acquisition.
Both products started as decks I would have made for a client and ended as software they could buy. That's the change I'm making.
I'm not a marketing engineer yet. I'm becoming one in public — this site is the journal of that transition. The honest version: I'm closer to the build half than I used to be, still further from it than I want to be, and the only way to close the gap is to keep shipping.
What I think this chapter is for: stop writing about systems someone else has to implement. Build the systems and let the writing be the documentation.
If you want to talk about consulting, hiring, or just the work — jesse.bern@hey.com.