Slickdeals · Jan 2020 – Mar 2023
Loyalty Product
Led product for Slickdeals' B2C loyalty program from 0→1 — scaling from zero to 500K users (270K MAUs) and generating $1.2M in incremental revenue in year one, on one of the most competitive deal-discovery platforms online.
Context
The situation
The loyalty program was greenfield — no existing infrastructure, no established user behavior patterns, and no proven playbook for what loyalty mechanics work in a deal-hunting community. The challenge was building something that would resonate with Slickdeals' highly engaged, deal-savvy audience without feeling generic or transactional.
Strategy
How I approached it
The program was built on a straightforward affiliate economics model: when a user clicked out to a merchant from Slickdeals and completed a purchase, Slickdeals earned an affiliate commission. A portion of that commission was passed back to the user as cashback in the form of points — credited after the merchant's return window closed to protect against fraud. Users could then bank those points and redeem them for retailer gift cards or a Visa gift card. The product strategy lived in three places: (1) the commission-to-cashback split — working closely with BD and finance to find a rate that was competitive enough to drive enrollment without eroding margin; (2) the activation loop — getting users from sign-up to first cashback event, because users who earned once retained at significantly higher rates; and (3) the redemption experience — making the path from points to gift card frictionless enough that users actually cashed out, which is what drove the LTV improvement. The success metric was incremental revenue per enrolled user, not raw enrollment count.
Execution
What I did
Accelerated MVP launch by two quarters through effective prioritization, stakeholder alignment, and agile project management.
Designed and executed structured A/B testing programs, acquiring ~2,000 new users per test and generating $21K incremental revenue per experiment.
Scaled program from 0 to 500K users (270K MAUs), generating $1.2M in incremental revenue in year one.
Drove engagement and conversion improvements through targeted loyalty acquisition and retention features — 30% engagement increase, 20% conversion increase, 200K+ new loyalty users.
Increased loyalty user lifetime value from $15 to $27 through experimentation, incentive optimization, and behavioral loop design.
Owned end-to-end development of Extension Coupon Auto-Apply product, leading a team of 4 engineers and achieving 100% OKR attainment for two consecutive years.
Partnered with BI to define and track acquisition, retention, and LTV metrics, ensuring roadmap decisions were data-driven.
Cross-Functional Leadership
Worked across engineering, marketing, business development, and finance. Recognized for high-impact contributions, leading to a full-time offer from Slickdeals LLC to transition from Cognizant-Softvision. The most critical cross-functional challenge was helping Business Development find the right balance between the affiliate revenue percentage negotiated with merchant partners and the cashback percentage offered to loyalty users — a tension that directly impacted program economics and user engagement. Getting that split right required close collaboration across BD, finance, and product.
Outcomes
Impact
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Scaled program from 0 to 500K users (270K MAUs) in year one
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$1.2M in incremental revenue attributed to loyalty program
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LTV increased from $15 to $27 per loyalty user
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30% engagement increase, 20% conversion increase
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200K+ new loyalty users acquired
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$21K incremental revenue per A/B test experiment
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100% OKR attainment for two consecutive years
Key Learnings
Loyalty is a product quality problem before it is a marketing problem. Users who don't find genuine value in the core product won't engage with a loyalty layer added on top. The wins came from deeply understanding what Slickdeals users actually cared about — saving money, finding deals before others — and designing rewards that delivered on those motivations specifically, not generically. Accelerating MVP by two quarters also proved that tight prioritization and stakeholder alignment matter more than headcount.
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