Startups
Scrappy years building real-time chat, web-to-print tooling, and commerce platforms before modern SaaS existed.
Founding Activa Live Chat
Activa Live Chat grew from a garage build into a real-time customer service platform with paying customers across retail and technology. We shipped features that are commonplace today—like text previews and rich snippets—long before chatbots were mainstream.
Milestones
- Sneak Peek let agents see what customers were typing before they hit send, reducing response time.
- Chatlets combined quick replies, images, and lightweight forms to speed up handoffs and gather context.
- The product and team were acquired by Salesforce, seeding live chat capabilities inside Service Cloud.
Building canvas & commerce platforms
Before off-the-shelf tooling existed, we assembled Activa Canvas and Activa Commerce—systems that let franchises customize collateral, upload assets, manage approvals, and ship orders nationwide.
What we learned
- Built a templating engine so non-technical admins could support localized marketing at scale.
- Extended the commerce stack to handle promotions, shipping logistics, and payment integrations.
- Translated those learnings into the service mentality that later shaped enterprise platform work.