Case study · Consultant, then Head of Growth, 2022–2024 · Updated September 2026
Pieces for Developers: from consulting client to Head of Growth.
- +1,700%
- active users
- +930%
- organic conversions
- +460%
- installs across three Product Hunt launches
- +268%
- organic impressions in the first quarter of consulting
The product.
Pieces for Developers is a developer productivity tool that saves, enriches, and resurfaces code snippets and context across the tools developers already use. When we started working together, the company had a substantial blog and a solid website, and neither was organized around how developers actually search.
The consulting engagement.
Stark Visibility was hired to fix organic. The core of the work was an SEO keyword mapping strategy: competitor, industry, and keyword research distilled into a visual sitemap that assigned a target keyword profile to every page on the domain. That architecture then drove on-page optimization across the site, so authority built around business-relevant terms instead of whatever the last blog post happened to target. How I do keyword mapping →
First-quarter results
- Organic impressions +268%, clicks +164%
- Total ranking keywords +137%
- 307 more keywords ranking at #1, a +187% increase
- Organic clicks to optimized pages +217%
- Engaged organic sessions +133%
Then they hired me.
The results were strong enough that Pieces asked me to join full-time as Head of Growth. I said yes, and spent the next two years owning the function and leading a team of five across content, design, and campaigns.
What I owned.
Launches, across every channel. Every product and feature release was planned as one campaign with one message: positioning and brand voice set first, then executed across the blog, email, social, paid, community, and the creator network, with a pre-launch audience built and a post-launch retargeting sequence behind it. I quarterbacked the five-person team through each one. Three of those launches ran on Product Hunt, and together they drove a 460% increase in installs. The third was better than the first because it ran on a playbook rather than adrenaline.
Organic. The keyword architecture from the consulting engagement, extended and scaled: organic traffic +200% and organic conversions +930%, because the pages that ranked were the pages built to convert.
The website. Led a full redesign and migration, rebuilding the site around that architecture with conversion paths designed for the free-install motion.
Creators. Built an influencer program from scratch for a developer audience: sourcing and vetting by audience fit, briefing creators to show the tool inside a real workflow, and measuring against installs rather than views. It became a reliable channel and the template for the program I later built at Quadratic. Creator marketing →
Paid and partnerships. Ran acquisition and retargeting campaigns alongside organic, and tested partnerships and co-marketing with adjacent developer tools. Some worked, some didn't, and the ones that didn't got killed quickly. Growth experiments ran on a cadence against a hypothesis, not a hunch.
Adoption and retention. Installs are the easy half for a free developer tool. A consistent brand voice across every touchpoint, onboarding content, and lifecycle messaging carried users from install to habit. Active users grew 1,700% over the engagement.
What I'd tell another founder.
- Architecture before content. The keyword map did more for organic than the next fifty blog posts would have.
- One message, every channel. A launch works when the blog, the email, the ad, and the creator video all say the same thing in the same voice. That's a coordination problem before it's a marketing one.
- Installs aren't adoption. For a free tool, the real number is the one measured weeks after the download.
- Consulting and full-time are the same job. The client saw the work and wanted more days of it. That's the model.