Case study
Built the operating layer behind onboarding, ad setup, campaign launch, retries, and account-manager workflows, turning repeated manual steps into reliable service throughput.
First engineering hire / operations systems
Shoelace originally launched as a SaaS product in the performance marketing space and evolved into a tech-enabled performance marketing service. As the model became more service-heavy, the bottleneck shifted from product features to operational throughput.
Vishaal joined as the first employee and first engineering hire, building the internal systems that helped service delivery scale without matching headcount growth.
At the time:
The operating problem was clear: if onboarding and campaign work stayed mostly manual, service delivery would be hard to run consistently and hard to scale.
Role: first engineering hire / operations systems.
Partners: three founders. Scope: cross-functional work focused on identifying the biggest operational bottlenecks and removing them through systems and automation, even when the underlying data and APIs were messy.
These systems absorbed a large share of the repeated coordination work that account managers would otherwise have handled manually.
The strategy was to automate the highest-leverage bottlenecks first, even though the environment stayed messy:
The systems had to be robust, retry-safe, observable, and overrideable when needed. Automation was paired with manual fallbacks so the workflow stayed reliable even when external systems changed or failed.
Before
After
As the business grew, these systems were extended to support additional ad formats, automated client reporting, and new workflow variations.
A field-service company has a similar pattern: repeated jobs, recurring customers, messy handoffs, external systems, and too much work depending on people remembering each step. The lesson from Shoelace is that the highest-leverage work is often not replacing the whole business system. It is building the operating layer that makes repeated service delivery reliable.
Why it matters for recurring compliance: when field or admin teams repeat the same handoff hundreds of times, the leverage is in the operating layer behind the work.