How I Went From Inexperienced to Owning an Agency and Building an App

In 2010, I was working as a sales and leasing consultant. Today, I’m building Vector, a personal finance app that started as a Google Sheet.

In between, I worked my way up at MagMod, joined a digital advertising agency, and co-founded an agency of my own. The titles changed quite a bit. So did the work. This is the longer version of how I got here.

The early years

My job at Prime Group involved a lot of direct contact with people. I answered inquiries, showed apartments, handled complaints and work orders, and helped coordinate move-outs and maintenance. There was also the less visible work: keeping track of apartment availability and preparing reports for management.

Photography and video were part of my working life too. I ran James Lowery Photography and Videography before and during my early years at MagMod. Those skills eventually became a much bigger part of my job.

Working my way up at MagMod

I joined MagMod in 2014, starting at the bottom. I was a gofer, then worked in fulfillment and customer support. Over time, I moved into marketing videography, became Growth Team Leader, and eventually Marketing Director.

In customer support, the work was very immediate. Someone had a problem, and I needed to understand it and help get it resolved. I tried to take ownership of that rather than pass it along.

The video work used a different set of skills. I came up with ideas, wrote scripts, shot footage, and edited it in Premiere Pro. I became the person people went to for that work. Having a background in photography and video meant I could contribute something beyond the role I’d originally been hired for.

As Growth Team Leader, I became responsible for results such as what it cost to acquire a customer and what we earned from our advertising. By the time I was Marketing Director, my work included coordinating creative, email, public relations, and campaign strategy. I also served on the executive leadership team and helped run the company’s operating meetings.

That progression put me in several parts of the same business. I’d worked with orders, customers, and creative production before taking on responsibility for the marketing department.

Agency work and the reporting problem

In 2021, I joined Boldly Grow Media, or BGMCo. My work there included buying ads and eventually serving as VP of Performance and Connected Media.

Alongside the advertising work, I started building tools to make the day-to-day work easier.

One example was our daily reporting. We had client Google Sheets that needed the previous day’s advertising numbers. Getting those numbers into the right places meant repeatedly pulling data from platforms and entering it by hand.

I taught myself enough JavaScript to automate that process. The data could be fetched and put into the correct cells after midnight, so the reports were ready without the same manual collection every morning.

I also built a budget-planning and pacing system that translated monthly advertising budgets into weekly and daily targets. It could show where spending was headed and what needed to change to stay on track.

Those projects sit quite naturally alongside the work I do now: understand a process, work out the rules, and build something that handles it more reliably.

Owning an agency

In 2024, I co-founded Waypoint Media Co., my own digital advertising agency.

We worked with e-commerce businesses on their advertising and marketing. My responsibilities included client delivery and measurement, along with the operations and priorities of the agency itself. I worked on turning clients’ goals into plans we could execute, test, and report on.

That chapter brought together much of what I’d already been doing in marketing and leadership, with the additional responsibility of running the business.

Building Vector

Vector grew out of a separate, very practical problem. I wanted envelope budgeting that worked the way I needed it to, so I built a Google Sheet.

The basic idea was straightforward: give money a purpose, keep track of what had been spent, and adjust as things changed. The spreadsheet let me work through that logic, but using it also exposed its limitations. Vector is the application I’m building from that foundation.

I use AI-assisted development, including Codex, to write the code. My work is in defining what the app should do, working through the rules, reviewing changes, and testing whether the result behaves correctly.

That gets detailed quickly. Expected income and money already in an account need to be treated differently. Moving money between accounts shouldn’t make it look like new income. A change to one part of the budget can affect another part. Those are the kinds of questions I work through as I build.

There’s still plenty to do. Right now, Vector brings together my experience with spreadsheets, business processes, and practical problem-solving in a product I’m building myself. It’s where much of my attention is today, and the clearest example of the work I’m moving toward.