Kate Connally

Clients Unpacking Value How I Work Background Reviews Advisory Contact info

  • Strategic, Analytical, Creative

    Product Marketing Services

     

    Deploying my unique mix of strategy, analytics and creative skills,

    I get to the heart of the product market challenge and drive results for your entire business.

     

    I specialize in:

    Price Optimization

    Product Market Fit

    Growth

    Monetization and Profitability

    Funnel Optimization

    Angel, Series Seed, Series A and B and Incubator

    Alpha, Beta, Soft Launch, Launch and Growth Stage Games

    Mobile, PC, Console. 

  • Clients include. . .

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    Product Marketing and Growth

    Google Mobile Ads Network

    The Vice President of Product Marketing for Ad Products recruited me to position the mobile App Ads and monetization platform to better serve the games industry-- the biggest segment of revenue on mobile. I led the collaboration across the Product, Marketing and Sales teams on the campaign "Google From Day 1." Together we articulated the story of why games teams should use Google's YouTube, search, Play store and Admob early on in the game development cycle to optimize growth and monetization design. Under my leadership, we increased Google's share of wallet for mobile game advertising budgets. This increase helped drive over 2B installs on the Google platform, a significant milestone that put us at parity with Facebook.

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    Product Development, Marketing and Growth

    Dolby Laboratories

    Dolby is a 50 year old technology company. The CMO brought me in to teach growth practices to multiple product and marketing teams and to assemble a go-to-market team that oversees development, launch and growth for a portfolio of direct-to-consumer services. The Dolby Access app has over 25M MAU, reflecting successful positioning, user flow optimizations, paid and organic UA, content and device partnerships.

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    Product Development and Marketing

    Geomagical Labs (acquired by IKEA, April 2020)

    Geomagical is an enhanced photography startup founded by top AI, photo, product and engineering leaders (former Groupon, Inktomi, Adobe).

    The Geomagical technology is the foundation of a powerful network of photorealistic "room models". The room models, community and platform together enable highly personalized discovery and engagement experiences for the home decor industry. As the marketing expert, I provide UX advice, marketing and soft launch services for the pre-release service and community. In April of 2020, IKEA announced it had acquired Geomagical Labs.

    StaffMeUp.com

    Product Marketing, Monetization and Profitability

    StaffMeUp

    The CEO of StaffMeUp, the leading hiring platform for media production, brought me in to build a formal product and growth team for the 12 year-old subscription-based marketplace. My responsibilities included product marketing for both demand (job postings) and supply (creative talent), subscription optimization and top of funnel growth.

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    Monetization and Profitability

    Couchsurfing International

    Couchsurfing is a global network of millennial travelers, connecting travelers with hosts; over 4M nights surfed in 2016. Based on my expertise monetizing social connection and trust in digital games, the CEO selected me to lead monetization of the CS marketplace and community. This included oversight of the membership product, premium benefits and advertising. Under my leadership, the business reached profitability.

  • Unpacking Customer Value

    (and growing the business as a result)

    For many new businesses, the early assumptions the team makes to get through the MVP stage deeply influence (and in some cases limit) the growth trajectory afterwards. While these assumptions were close enough to show the early potential of the product, as the business matures, the team has so many more tools to understand and drive the customer value. I work with teams to unpack the customer value and open new opportunities for growth:

     

     

    Raising prices without conversion erosion

    More effective upsell moments

    More extensible and authentic top of funnel messaging

    Substantial co-marketing partnerships

      

    1

    Unpack the Value

    Let's pull apart the who, what, where, when and why and how of your value proposition.

    2

    Test Tactics

    Identify opportunities across the customer lifecycle to better articulate that value.

    3

    Scale and Deliver Results

    Build and scale sustainable features and programs that drive profitable growth.

  • Teaching Teams to Fish

    We are all familiar with the proverbial wisdom, "Give someone a fish, and you feed them for a day. Teach someone to fish, and you feed them for a lifetime." I teach teams the 21st Century equivalent of fishing, growth! Growth is multi-disciplinary and spans product strategy, rigorous analytics and, of course, powerful story-telling and community engagement. From value proposition to core loop, from top-of-funnel to LTV, I help your team develop the full stack plan for sustainable growth and align the entire organization around the endeavor.

     

    While every client engagement is different, it is helpful to divide an engagement into general phases. Depending on the situation, we will spend more or less (or none at all) on each phase.

    1

    Audit

    Evaluate the state of the current product and brand marketing organizations, identify strengths and key areas for development.

    2

    Collaborate

    Deep dive on the audit with the all stakeholders. Collaborate on roadmap to address deficits and doubledown on what is working best.

    3

    Build

    Assemble and train team-- including internal recruits and new hires. Establish rhythm for marketing and product iteration. Roll-out KPI's and dashboards across entire organization.

  • Background

    My CV is here and check out my LinkedIn.

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    General Manager, AddictingGames, Nickelodeon

    Building a leading games platform

    I led the growth of the AddictingGames business from a single-page web directory into the largest free, online game site in the world-- and the largest, most profitable digital media property for our eventual corporate parent, MTV Networks. With a team of 15 product managers, content producers, community and social managers and analysts, we built a distribution and monetization platform for thousands of online games and established a top 5 entertainment brand for teen-agers. Under my leadership the business grew from serving 1M consumer to over 30M. We pioneered free-to-play monetization, spanning D2C consumables and integrated advertising across online, television and mobile.

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    CEO, Bontom Games

    Building the digital "Settlers of Catan" game and community

    Selected by Alsop Louie Partners (twitch.tv and Niantic) to evaluate and then restart, with a new plan, the original Goko HTML5 game platform. Under my leadership, we assessed and transitioned assets of the HTML5 platform into a mobile game platofrm for multip-player games. This involved hiring new product, design, marketing, engineering and operations teams and recapitalizing the company. Together with this new team, we developed and operated mobile free-to-play game communities for hit tabletop games, "Settlers of Catan" and "Dominion."

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    CEO and co-Founder, Tadami Video Playground

    Interactive Video platform for mobile phones and tablets

    Motivated by the mass availability of video cameras on mobile phones and tablets, I led the development of "Tadami Video Engine," a platform for real-time interactive video for kids and teens, using the camera on mobile devices. I built a team of product managers, engineers and content pros from Nickelodeon, Leapfrog, Lucas and Fox Interactive. We raised $1.5M in seed funding. After launching and iterating applications across greeting cards, dance games and speech therapy, we pursued a licensing strategy. We licenses the tehnology to be used in leading language learning applications and in a dance application developed by KID Interactive (Bop-It).

  • Reviews

    "Kate offers a rare combo of analytical and creative super powers-- all supercharged by her boundless energy. Teams move at 10x speed with Kate driving them."

    Lee Crawford, Director of Engineering, Uber Technologies, my colleague from AddictingGames, Shockwave, Bontom Games and StaffMeUp.

    "Kate provided a much needed strategic perspective to our monetization efforts. Her leadership enabled us to grow the LTV per user and ensure profitability for the service."

    Jen Billock, Product Lead at Facebook, former CEO of Couchsurfing, leader during my engagement.

    "When Kate came in, the Access business was struggling. She swiftly analyzed the situation and identified the biggest opportunity. Then, she aligned the team, partners and the greater organization on the growth and profitability plan."

    Lisa Luscap, VP of Digital, Dolby Laboratories, managed my engagement.

  • Industry Leadership

    I am a recognized leader on media and services for families and teens.

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