Who First

Understanding your customer is the most important thing you can do.

To serve a prospect or customer, you HAVE to understand them.
To improve your outcomes, you HAVE to measure the people behind the KPI.
To work effectively, your team MUST be able to communicate and collaborate on audience understanding.

The Who First toolset equips companies and organizations to:
* Develop a practical and measurable understanding of their audiences
* Serve their audiences better, doing more with less
* Measure their outcomes better, learning why things work
* Create audience focused teams, so everyone is rowing in the same direction

Principal and Creator

JoshOakes.com - Advisor on Customer Acquisition & Product Development

Understanding your customer is always the most important thing.

I help you understand, build for, and acquire customers. So you can serve your customers better.

Through fractional leadership, training, and advising I help organizations define and understand their audiences, build products and experiences for them, and acquire customers.

I've worked with app, SaaS, social network, education, media, agency, healthcare, and entertainment companies.

Advisor to Investors, Executives, and Entrepreneurs

duckscore / OwnIt

People should know exactly what it takes to realize the dream of homeownership.

OwnIt Holdings is bridging the gap between consumer fin-tech and prop-tech. We are building tools to enable consumers to view themselves more like a lender sees them.

Co-Founder, Chief Product Officer

Measurable Advantage: Eliminate bottlenecks in your customer acquisition

I help organizations improve marketing performance with a structured approach to developing more sophisticated and effective marketing operations. This brings focus to marketing activities, clarity to marketing priorities, and visibility to marketing performance.

I work typically with organizations that have: 
— Multiple digital touchpoints or channels
— A high touch or multitouch acquisition process
— Longer term relationships with customers
— Mission-orientation

Principal

[meta]marketer

Responsible for leading department staff, overseeing all client work and development of all processes, frameworks, and templates.
Client work consisted of researching and analyzing digital marketing efforts including web analytics data, paid search, organic search, social media, content marketing, CRM and marketing automation data to deliver strategic and tactical insight for the improvement of efficiency and efficacy of digital marketing efforts.
Served as the primary interface with client stakeholders across multiple teams–including Marketing, Product Development, Technology, and Management–and at various levels. This included auditing, troubleshooting, and implementation assistance at the tactical level up to strategy, reporting, and feedback to the C-Suite.
Developed propriety training offerings and all materials and content. Conducted in depth training workshops and seminars garnering universally positive feedback from clients in small to medium sized companies across numerous industries.

Director of Optimization (Director of Client Services)

NoiseTrade

Worked alongside founding partners, providing User Experience, Analytics, and Product Development  consulting. Also assisted with customer support issues to collect “voice of customer” data from customers (artists) and users (fans/visitors).

Product Development and Support

MacAuthority

Promoted from Technical Sales for local and regional corporate accounts to Service Manager. Responsible for ensuring that the service department provides an ideal customer experience through the consistent, timely, accurate completion of all service requests; also responsible for ensuring compliance with company and partner policies in addition to overseeing the training and certification of department staff, maintenance of department resources and conditions and ensuring that department utilization, profitability, and customer satisfaction metrics meet or exceed company goals.

Service Manager

The MacSuperstore

Responsible for ensuring that the service department provides an ideal customer experience through the consistent, timely, accurate completion of all service requests; also responsible for ensuring compliance with company and partner policies in addition to overseeing the training and certification of department staff, maintenance of department resources and conditions and ensuring that department utilization, profitability, and customer satisfaction metrics meet or exceed company goals.

Alpha Digital Solutions, LLC

Responsible as VP of Product Development for developing and documenting product requirements, prototyping user interfaces, and identifying product opportunities. Served as primary liaison and project manager to outsourced development team.

VP Product Development

Bay Leaning, Inc.

Front End and User Interface development and Engineering Management for a SaaS startup targeting higher-education institutional customers.

Engineering Manager, UI Engineer

Understanding your customer is always the most important thing. They're the ones with the money.

I won’t stop saying it: Understanding your customer is always the most important thing. They're the ones with the money.

Want to talk? https://whofirst.link/schedule

When you're using the Who First Framework you will:
• Create products & experiences that make your customers say "Oh sh!t!"
• Create Create content that hits your customer’s bullseye.  

What that means:
• How to capture real insights from your actual customers 👉 not rest on your collective biases and assumptions.
• How to DOCUMENT and VALIDATE Audience Profiles 👉 instead of made-up personas and bullsh!rt ICPs.
• How to make your customer understanding ACTIONABLE 👉 instead of just dumping it on your shared drive and never looking at it again.
• How to MEASURE your outcomes with the tools and systems you use  so you can actually 👉 move the needle.

How:
• Done With You and Done For You services
• Advising execs
• Self-service tools and templates

More about Who First: who-first.co
More about me: joshoakes.com

Joshua Oakes

SeeSnap is focused on helping those in construction/proptech have fast, efficient, and error-free operations

I build. I scale. I execute. For over 25 years, I’ve been in the trenches building companies, products, and services from the ground up—and doing it repeatedly. I take ideas from “just a thought” to $15M+ businesses, and I thrive on turning complexity into clarity.

Today, I work as a fractional CEO, CFO, and COO, helping business owners get results, solve problems, and execute without excuses. Some of what I’ve done:

Scaled White Olive CPA into a high-growth, operationally excellent firm.

Built multiple startups from $0 → $10M+, including apps, SaaS, hardware, professional services, and operational platforms.

Designed and implemented full business ecosystems: Product, legal, accounting, marketing, sales, and operations.

Launched market-winning products and services that generate repeatable revenue. Recognized as a multi-time Inc. 500 honoree and Nashville Future 50 leader with products across all major distribution channels, top 100 retail stores and I 42 countries.  I combine strategic insight with hands-on execution, building scala-ble operations, high-performing teams, and measurable results.

If you want to win, let’s talk: 

mark@whiteolivecpa.com (for accounting and advisory needs) 

 markfilaroski.mf@gmail.com (for grind ventures, and so on)

taplio

The Battle

Joshua Oakes

Mr. Mark Russell Filaroski 🤳

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