Startups will teach you many things. But one lesson I’ve carried through every role is this:
If I solve a problem today, I should solve it in a way that the next SE after me never has to solve it again.
At startups I worked at, Vectorflow and AlphaPoint, I wasn’t handed clean processes or templated PoCs. I was dropped into a sea of scrappy clients, well-meaning chaos, and a few too many Slack channels. Which is to say — I loved it.
Over time, I stopped seeing issues as one-offs. A support ticket wasn’t a “problem” — it was a signal. A PoC that went long wasn’t a “delay” — it was a chance to build a better playbook. Eventually, I wasn’t just trying to be helpful. I was trying to make our entire GTM motion feel like it had an engine under it.
Here are two stories from that journey — one about solving friction at scale, the other about templating speed into every customer demo that came after.
Like all great startup legends, this one begins with a badge printer. During a rollout for a healthcare client, I kept seeing the same JIRA tickets pop up. Misconfig this. Template not loading that. The kind of tickets that quietly fill support queues and slowly drain morale.
I pulled a few weeks of logs. Sure enough — badge design and printing issues were a top support burden. But it wasn’t just the volume. It was the repeat questions that killed us.
So I did what any SE with a grudge against ticket volume would do — I made a doc. A beautiful, painfully detailed doc. It walked users through printer setup, template logic, and image uploads. I paired it with a Loom video, dropped it into onboarding kits, and made sure both Support and the client had it bookmarked like gospel.
This wasn’t just about fewer tickets. It was about creating internal confidence — between SEs, Support, and the client. Everyone knew what to expect. Everyone had the same artifact. No escalations, no guesswork.
I didn’t just solve a setup issue. I built a bridge.
I was juggling PoCs for Delta, BU, and Atrium. Different industries. Different buyers. Same questions: Can your AI match visitor photos against a banned list? Can it prevent someone from ghost-swiping into our buildings? Will this actually work with our existing cameras?
Instead of reinventing the wheel every week, I started crafting a reusable scaffold. The UI logic. The demo flows. The questions I knew would come. The answers that Sales would need. At the heart of it was our image-matching intelligence — the same tech used differently depending on who was watching the demo.
Delta used it to verify security clearance in real-time. Atrium used it to eliminate duplicate badge identities. The bones were identical — the skin changed depending on the audience.
I didn’t treat templating as a shortcut. I treated it like infrastructure. I made it easier to show the right pain to the right buyer, with the right value story.
I’m not here to just show up and demo. I design the playbooks. I build the bridges. I solve a problem once so five teams don’t have to solve it again. Whether I’m documenting badge printers or abstracting a security PoC into a teaching tool, I’m thinking about scale — and the person on the other side of the call.
MEDDIC-lite in action: I chase pain, build toward metrics, and elevate champions — even when no one’s using that language out loud.
If this mindset sounds familiar — if you’ve ever found yourself rewriting onboarding flows because “it was just easier to do it myself the right way” — we might get along well.
👉 Looking for a post-sale SE energy? See another real-world SE play: my AWS cost monitor build →