Orbit

The project

I joined Orbit when it was just Jacob, the founder, with an idea to make business referrals frictionless and allow businesses to make the most of their networks. We wanted to turn a network that a business already has into warm introductions, with those best placed to vouch for the company initiating the outreach, hoping for a much better return than cold outreach.

There was no product team. I hired the founding team, set up how Ops, Engineering and Sales handed work between each other, and took the product from nothing to its first enterprise customers.

I built working prototypes in Claude Code and shipped code to production, produced interactive flows and build-ready specs engineers implemented directly, and validated problem–solution fit through discovery and market testing before scaling.

After helping them to funding, real user traction and a self-sustaining team, I moved on to Athena Blue to help them through a similar process.

The problem

There are a number of blockers standing between employees and referrals. We found that most people below a team lead don’t even think they can make referrals - after all, who would they have built a relationship with that stage who could sign off on multi million pound contracts. For the more senior folk you’re asking them to put their reputation behind an introduction, then asking the person they introduce to hand over information about themselves to a company they’ve never heard of. Both sides have every reason to stop halfway. It’s rarely the case that an introduction feels effortless and safe.

So the product problem was: how much can you ask for, and when, before people walk away? What are their incentives in the first place? And how can we aid them in knowing how to approach the introduction and convey the value to each party?

The Approach

1. Ask for less and fill in the blanks ourselves.

The more you ask of users, the more opportunity you give them to drop out or put it off. First we frame the incentives and how it works, as succinctly as possible.

I worked with the clients to figure out the minimum we could ask for that let us make the introduction, and finding the rest from public data or internal company data provided by the client.

Each stage of the funnel was then iterated against engagement data and what users told us, rather than shipping features because someone asked. through this we achieved 20% MoM user growth over 6 months

2. Different people need different reasons

The commonplace referral product gives everyone the same incentive, but they’re not all driven by the same things. Some just care about the money. Some care about their reputation with the person they’re referring. Some just want it to be quick. Some want to be involved in the process and others want minimal interference with their day job.

I partnered with behavioural researchers at the University of Warwick to work out user segments and which levers mattered most to which segments. This helped drive: introductions made through a trusted source, personalised messages, incentives weighted to what each person actually cared about. Referrals went up 36%.

3. Bespoke first, platform second

BizDev at major enterprise clients don’t want to manage another tool, they have their own CRM and everybody’s was different. Salesforce, HubSpot, custom fields, different shapes of data.

The initial drive was to build a generic integration layer up front. We built the first few bespoke, then decided, with Engineering, which of those bespoke builds graduated into reusable patterns the platform owned, with customisable JSON outputs so the next client was configuration rather than code. This facilitated our architecture in scaling to hundreds of clients without us building hundreds of integrations.

Shipped

• The onboarding flow end to end, and the explanation of the value proposition
• Referral incentives and messaging, profile aware
• CRM integration architecture: Salesforce, HubSpot, custom JSON outputs
• Working prototypes and build-ready specs in Claude Code, implemented directly by engineers
• The operating model between Ops, Engineering and Sales
• Risk management and RACI for user data handling

On the commercial side

I ran onboarding and business development directly with the first clients, securing the first five enterprise partnerships through the POC phase and feeding what they said back into the roadmap.