Sideline Ortho

Sideline Ortho is a youth sports injury-reporting platform. I came in mid-build, alongside its physician founder and technical lead, and inherited a referral funnel that was reporting zero conversions.

Zero is a strange number. It usually isn't a performance problem. It's a sign that something upstream never happened at all.

Before optimizing the funnel, I audited the system underneath it. The notification integration had never delivered an email. Not a low open rate, not a deliverability issue. It had never sent one.

So the problem wasn't conversion. The process was broken before anyone had the opportunity to convert. Every hour spent tuning messaging would have been spent tuning a message nobody received.

The notification workflow was rebuilt around SMS, which fits how parents and coaches actually behave in the minutes after an injury happens. Then we could see real behavior for the first time, which is the point.

Launch readiness was structured into a 20-gate framework, so "are we ready?" stopped being a feeling and became a list anyone on the team could check.

Pilot strategy moved forward across three tracks in two markets, which gave us more than one read on whether the product worked, instead of betting the launch on a single group.

There's usually a problem underneath the obvious problem. The obvious problem was conversion. The real one was a system that never ran.

Finding that is the work: audit the machinery before you optimize the output, then build the structure that keeps the team from having to guess.