Scaling the Publisher Platform to 3M+ Sites

ShareThis's publisher growth had plateaued. The onboarding experience was manual and fragmented, requiring significant back-and-forth between publishers and the support team before a site went live. This created a direct constraint on network growth — and network scale is the core of ShareThis's data moat. Meanwhile, there was no structured product-led growth motion: experiments were ad hoc, acquisition and retention weren't measured rigorously, and the publisher dashboard offered little reason for publishers to stay engaged after initial setup.

I was brought on to build and lead the product-led growth team for the ShareThis Publisher Platform from the ground up. I owned the entire product lifecycle — from conceptualization and requirements gathering through specification, implementation review, and release. My mandate was to treat the publisher platform as a B2C growth product: apply systematic experimentation, own the funnel metrics, and drive meaningful improvements to acquisition, activation, retention, and engagement.

• Built and led ShareThis's first product-led growth team for the Publisher Platform, establishing the growth function, processes, and experimentation cadence from scratch.
• Ran weekly growth experiments based on the Reforge Growth Model, targeting improvements across the full funnel: Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Engagement, and Website Optimization.
• Managed cross-functional collaboration across engineering, UX, design, and marketing/GTM to prioritize growth initiatives based on measured impact.
• Redesigned the publisher onboarding flow with a self-serve-first approach, reducing required support touchpoints significantly and improving time-to-first-integration.
• Monitored and analyzed A/B and multivariate testing of new features and website conversion rates using Mixpanel, VWO, Google Analytics, and Domo to continuously optimize the user experience.
• Introduced in-product analytics directly into the publisher dashboard (Sharing Intelligence) to increase stickiness and give publishers a reason to return after activation.
• Partnered with data science and engineering to build real-time integration validation, allowing publishers to confirm a successful setup instantly — eliminating a major drop-off point in the funnel.

Publisher activation rates improved materially over the course of the growth program. The structured experimentation cadence created a repeatable playbook for testing and shipping growth improvements. Reducing friction in the onboarding process freed up the publisher success team to focus on strategic accounts, and the self-serve improvements contributed directly to the expansion of the ShareThis publisher network to over 3 million sites — a core competitive asset that powers the company's data and audience targeting business.