I'm Will Clark, a Product & Technology Leader, Designer, Engineer and Artist living in the Pacific Northwest

As Co-Founder of Kickplan, I transformed a market gap into an innovative SaaS billing infrastructure company. Launched in 2023, we achieved revenue in just 12 months with a lean team of three, defying the brutal tech market downturn. 
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Leveraging insights from my time at Stellar and Chargify, my contributions:

• Spearheaded a $900K pre-seed raise, bringing on board Mucker Capital, Cascade Seed Fund, First Row Partners, and strategic angel investors
• Built and drove the entire product vision and roadmap, shaping our platform from concept to market reality
• Led go-to-market strategy, crafting our brand identity and sales playbook from scratch
• Scaled from zero to paying customers within our first year while maintaining capital efficiency

Led the spin-off of Stellar from Goldstar Events, seamlessly transitioning the product platform, creating corporate infrastructure (finance infrastructure, vendor agreements, HR/Payroll operations, etc.), and leading the culture building of the new team and company. Managed all product related functions and employees including Engineering, Design, Product Management, Product Marketing and Infrastructure. 

• Conceptualized and led the implementation of industry-leading product capabilities such as Hybrid Ticketing, hardware contribution encoder integration, top-level-domain website builder, fully secure video rental and web-scale real-time chat infrastructure replacement.
• Led marketing by creating an Account-based marketing funnel, product marketing website and collateral and ultimately recruiting a new Head of Marketing from a unicorn startup. Also led the sales cycles for the three largest customers acquired in 2022 (Oregon Shakespeare Festival, BroadwayOnDemand and Bandai Namco).
• Personally engineered numerous video-centric industry first features including Dolby Atmos and Dolby Vision ticketed live streaming, a unified workflow for both playout-based live and on demand video with live closed captioning, and live streaming with alternative video tracks supporting American Sign Language overlays.

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CHIEF PRODUCT OFFICER – STELLAR (5/2020 – PRESENT) 

As sole Product Manager, propelled nimble response to COVID by refocusing Product and Development teams on new Stellar platform for live-streaming live events while balancing priorities between product innovation, P&L management, team building, business operations, and leadership.

• Provided hands-on contributions to back-end architecture while concurrently leading art direction for brand and product design.
• Implemented video technology by monitoring trends in virtual events, evaluating technology solutions, and planning for current and future business needs to allow for initial launch and scalability. 
• Sold the first ticket 29 days after writing the first line of code. Delivered first paid show to people on 4 continents 60 days after product conception, streamed live show to 8,000 concurrent viewers in 10/2020, and delighted 37,000 people viewing 8 concurrent shows in 12/2020.

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HEAD OF PRODUCT (10/2016 – 5/2020) 

Oversaw ¼ of entire workforce, including 5 Product Managers, while leading design, engineering, and product management of mobile apps and other technologies.

• Delivered visionary change leadership as company grew from start-up to 5 distinct, enhancing performance of product teams by implementing enterprise-wide OKR-based strategic planning and championing Dual Track Agile methodology.
• Nurtured staff engagement and satisfaction by creating career advancement ladder and professional development plans with final say across 45-member Product and Engineering organization.
• Influenced CEO to adopt new program based on The Culture Code, improving overall company culture and delivering unprecedented loyalty with an average employee tenure of 4.3 years in my department.
• Advocated for creating Data Science and Machine Learning (ML) team ahead of competitors, which has unleashed 3 generations of ML-based recommendations systems, yielding 20% greater conversion rates and recognition by The Ticketing Business Forum in 2019 with “Insights & Analytics Award.”
• Partnered with Consultant to create, present, and gain buy-in for new company vision and collaborated with Design Director and outside designer to successfully rebrand and relaunch business with modernized image.  
• Upon being forced to lay off 1/3 of staff due to 99% COVID-related revenue losses, networked throughout industry and landed 6 former employees new jobs within 60 days.

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DIRECTOR OF PRODUCT (3/2012 – 10/2016) 

Assumed additional management responsibilities while continuing to drive strategic product innovation and launch.

• Identified, negotiated, remodeled, and launched 3 Portland offices, instituting transformative processes as Regional Head.
• Guided deployment of first mobile website, which accounted for 60% of total revenue by 2018.
• Hired staff to build first native mobile app, providing product management and art direction, resulting in 4.8-rated, wildly popular app with 32K reviews and increased LTCV for app users.
• Pioneered industry-leading ticket fulfillment innovation garnering direct relationships with Ticketmaster, AXS, Cirque du Soleil, and Broadway Inbound, unlocking opportunity for $20M investment from strategic partner.

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NEW PRODUCT / R&D CONSULTANT (12/2009 – 3/2012) 

Helped develop internal product organization, including team, policies, products, roadmaps, and strategies in collaboration with C-suite and multidisciplinary teams.

• Recruited, hired, and trained top performers to conceptualize, build, and launch new product beta, with full accountability for budget compliance, project management, and art direction.
• Dramatically enhanced adoption of premium recurring subscription product from <100 subscribers to $1M+/year profit by re-designing discovery and buying process.
• Spearheaded addition of new “voucher” ticket that freed organization from legacy will-call system, facilitated real-time emailed .PDF tickets, and came to account for >60% of sales.
• Developed novel “Sit with Friends” feature as primary designer, which was successfully patented (US20120265564A1).
• Significantly influenced team and culture by hiring first front-end developers and championing CI/CD, which transformed deployment capacity from 1X every 2 weeks with hours of downtime to up to 10X/day with no service interruptions.

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