How I led the technical development of a custom affiliate platform and scaled Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) revenue.
Our scaling e-commerce platform required a highly specialised affiliate reward ecosystem that off-the-shelf SaaS tools simply could not support. We needed an engine that could handle complex attribution logic and database triggers securely between independent brands, affiliates, and end-users.
Simultaneously, the marketing function needed to rapidly scale user acquisition without relying on an enterprise ad budget. We faced a classic scale-up hurdle: needing custom-engineered functionality on a lean budget.
Standard affiliate plugins couldn’t handle our custom ‘Reward-on-Redemption’ logic.
Paid media costs were rising; we needed an organic acquisition engine.
Marketing needed features faster than the dev team could ship them.
Resolving this required embedding core marketing architecture directly into the engineering product roadmap. I stepped into a hybrid pivot role to oversee our proprietary backend database rules, building a custom reward attribution engine completely from scratch. To scale user acquisition organically, I engineered a custom programmatic SEO framework that automated landing page generation, while tightly optimising the WooCommerce checkout layer to handle high transaction volumes seamlessly.
Designed the database schema to track user rewards across multi-touchpoint journeys, moving beyond 'Last-Click' attribution.
Built 'Virility' into the code, automating referral prompts based on user behaviour triggers (e.g., post-redemption).
Implemented Jira workflows to synchronise Dev Sprints with Marketing Launch Calendars.
I leveraged my background in Full-Stack Development (PHP/HTML/CSS) to bridge the gap between the CTO and the Marketing team. We didn’t just ‘request’ features; we hard-coded marketing requirements into the product roadmap.
To solve the Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) issue, we built an automated organic traffic engine.
Structured product data to allow for "mass page generation.
Coded dynamic landing page templates that auto-populated with specific product keywords.
Connected sign-ups directly to a custom email sequence (drip campaigns) based on the specific product category they landed on.
Increase in sign-ups over 18 months.
Dominated niche keywords via Programmatic SEO.
Achieved via custom API integrations.
Successfully launched the platform to market.
