The SellerCrowd contribution engine

Two charts tell the story up front. Monthly contributions went from near zero to over 24,000. MRR tripled, from $111K to $356K, on flat headcount. They're the same story told twice: as contributions grew, the data got more valuable; as the data got more valuable, pricing power followed; as pricing grew, free access for top contributors became more valuable, and they kept contributing harder. The rest of this case study is how that loop got built and tuned over five years.

Stripe profile: profile.stripe.com/sellercrowd

Where I walked in

When I joined SellerCrowd in July 2021, the business had been flat for a while. Flat community. Flat revenue. Flat contributions. My job wasn't to make the product prettier. It was to work with Clay and the leadership team to diagnose the real unlock and ship it.

SellerCrowd is the largest media-sales community in the US, but that framing hides what it is as a product. It's a 100% community-contributed database of prospects and intel. Every useful piece of information on the site was posted by a seller, for other sellers. The community is the surface. The data is the product. The data is what people pay for.

That shape means the most important metric in the business isn't sign-ups, active users, or session time. It's contributions. If contributions grow, data quality grows. If data quality grows, pricing power grows. If pricing power grows, we can keep giving SellerCrowd to contributors for free, which is the deepest incentive to contribute. Every growth lever sits on one upstream metric.

Before touching the contribution problem, I built the design system the product was missing. Six months on tokens, components, patterns, and visual language. The next two years were going to ask us to ship fast and often, and every hour spent on the system upfront was an hour saved downstream. By January 2022 we had a foundation that could keep up with the pace of decisions. Then we got to work on the engine.

Why contributions stalled

Contributions in 2021 were posted through forms buried inside specific pages, with no signal back to the contributor that anyone had noticed. Three problems stacked: contributions were hard to discover (forms in the wrong places), contributing had too much friction (people wanted to talk, not fill dropdowns), and the contribution itself was invisible afterwards (no leaderboard, no thanks, no status). The fix had to address all three at once.

Making contributions visible

The moves in this section came out of workshops I led in Barcelona in 2021. We met to commit, as a team, to what the contribution problem actually was. Two things came out of the room: contributions had no visibility on the site, and the form-based model had to go. Workshops that end in “let's keep thinking” are cheap. This one ended with a plan, and the plan shipped through 2022.

Three moves landed across that year.

First, forms became open fields. Instead of a structured form per page, contributors got a simple text area and could post whatever they wanted. CTAs landed across the relevant pages of the product so sellers could drop intel from wherever they were, not just where it would end up.

Second, contributions got visible. We built a module on the feed's right rail called NIOC (New in Org Charts) and placed it front and centre. Monthly cadence, monthly reset, monthly leaderboard. Your post showed up where your peers saw it. Contribution turned into status.

Third, gems and VIPs. Gems are a virtual currency earned for every meaningful contribution. Earn ten in a month and you became a VIP, which unlocked SellerCrowd itself for free. The prize wasn't the gems. The prize was the access. Gems were how you tracked your way to it. A six-beat email sequence kept contributors on the path: invite, mid-month nudge, last-week push, last-two-days reminder, “way to go” or “you lost your seat” with a clear path back.

The logic under all three moves: sellers will contribute if the site tells them it noticed.

Behavior into data

With the new contribution paths live, volume went up. So did a new problem: low-context posts. People started dropping bare emails, a name on its own, a title without a company, all claiming credit for the gems attached. The system was rewarding quantity without noticing quality.

I proposed reworking the gem economy around insight depth. The deeper the insight, the more gems. A contact name on its own earned a small reward. Context about the role, the patch, the buying pattern earned more. A full intel write-up earned the most. We wrote this into a set of Contribution Guidelines, published them to the community, and rebuilt the gem payouts underneath. Abuse dropped. Quality went up.

By 2023 the data had grown enough to justify a price move. Three things went live together: the depth-weighted gem economy, our first monthly price increase from $19 to $37 (we also renamed the plan from Individual to Pro), and a new monetary reward layer on the leaderboard. The community got an email explaining why: part of the proceeds were going straight back to the contributors keeping the product alive. Sellers saw the price go up. Sellers saw the site pay its best contributors. Contributions jumped, revenue jumped, and the price-goes-up-people-leave reflex never showed up.

Alongside that, I proposed dropping the flat-rate enterprise model. A team of 20 and a team of 200 had been paying roughly the same deal. We moved enterprise to per-seat: easier to explain because it was fairer, bigger teams paid for more seats, expansion inside existing accounts became a lever we hadn't really had before.

One more move closed out 2024: one-click contributions for the high-frequency post types. “Person left the team.” “Team moved to a different agency.” “Person joined a new agency.” All used to be free-text posts. We built one-click actions for each common pattern. Tap, confirm, the post is live.

Contributions tripled.

The $47 call, and what 2025 confirmed

Heading into 2024, contributions had grown 2.5x since the first price move. My position was straightforward: match the price to the value of the data, go to $67 a month, hold there through 2025 to give users space. Clay wanted to be more conservative. We landed on $47, and introduced a Plus tier at $137 with deeper benefits for heavier users.

2025 turned out to be the A/B test we hadn't planned on running. We raised the standard plan from $47 to $67, the same number I'd argued for a year earlier, and no complaints came back. Nobody cancelled. Nobody pushed back.

Roughly a million dollars of cash the business didn't collect in 2024. I'm telling you about it because it's the honest lesson in this story, not the victory lap. The right price argument still has to land inside the team's conviction, and in 2024 we chose the safer number together. What 2025 taught us is that when the flywheel is running and the data's telling you the market has room, caution is quietly the more expensive call.

What this says about how I work

Five years of decisions, three threads.

Design as business diagnosis.The brief never said “redesign the contribution form.” It said “we're flat.” Getting from flat to 3x MRR meant diagnosing what the product actually was, the data, not the community, and designing the engine that made the data come in.

Behavioral design, never gamification.The VIP loop, the leaderboard, and the gem economy aren't points-and-badges on top of a product. They're the mechanism the product uses to translate user behavior into data the business can sell. Structural claim, not a cosmetic one.

Workshops that end in commitments.The Barcelona 2021 workshops weren't the only time. We ran this play several times across the five years. Everyone in the same room, diagnose honestly, pick the priorities, leave with a plan that actually ships. Workshops that end in moodboards are cheap. Workshops that end in shipping dates move the business.