Who I Am and Why I Started This Newsletter
My background and future plans
My name is James Critelli, and thank you for checking out my newsletter. My hope with this newsletter is to share some of the knowledge and insight I have gotten from an over 10 year career in the advertising, tech, and startup industries. My background is fairly unique, and I like to think that this gives me the ability to analyze problems from many different angles and provide a fresh perspective.
In 2013, I graduated from Cornell with an all purpose business degree, and got a job working at Vivaki, a New York based ad agency owned by Publicis, one of the big 4 ad agencies. Through a stroke of luck, I left Vivaki to join MightyHive, a high-flying ad tech startup based in San Francisco, as the 5th employee and 10th team member. Working at MightyHive was an incredible journey, and I got to work with some big name brands including Atlassian, Optimizely, Caesar’s Entertainment, and AP Watches. During this time, MightyHive grew exceptionally quickly, and was acquired for $150 million in 2018.
I wanted to try something new after MightyHive, and did a coding bootcamp at Hack Reactor, where I went from a coding novice to being able to build full scale websites and apps in short order. I worked as an engineer for a year before I co-founded Stackmatix, my own agency focused on helping to grow and scale startups. While MightyHive largely involved working with enterprise clients, at Stackmatix, I got to work with startups such as Figma, Base10 Partners, Backblaze, Kalshi, Nursing.com, Pet Honesty, and Apply Design. Multiple clients we worked with were acquired, one IPO’d, and many grew like weeds and raised $50+ million in funding. We also worked with multiple clients from all the big startup accelerators, including 500 Startups, Techstars, StartX, HF0, and YCombinator. In addition, during this period I also became an active angel investor, and have invested in 9 startups to date, with one acquisition thus far and many startups who are still active.
While Stackmatix was a fantastic experience, and we built a team of 10 full-time people and close to 40 clients, I decided to move on in December 2023 and investigate new opportunities. This newsletter is one of those new opportunities and I hope to focus primarily on how entrepreneurs and business owners can grow and scale as efficiently and effectively as possible. This will cover everything from what tactics I’d suggest at different budget levels to what are key considerations before outsourcing your marketing, to how to use AI to automate key parts of your marketing, and much more. I also intend to share my predictions for the tech, startup, and growth spaces as well as what I believe are the key trends to keep an eye on.
I appreciate you checking out my Substack, and hope that you’ll find something of value and become a long-term subscriber.