Prompt Engineer
My first real opportunity to speak with a prompt engineer and it was a fantastic session with Michael, who was extremely knowledgeable and helpful. Several valuable takeaways that will be massively helpful to me in building out my B2B SaaS startup. A great mentor!
Excellent to meet a fellow prompt engineer. The conversation was very fruitful, we discovered quite a few things we have in common and we will hopefully talk again soon!
Great session and super helpful feedback about my new AI tool. Thanks Mike!
*** Currently only accepting calls regarding prompt engineering *** - I have a popular Udemy course on Prompt Engineering with 60,000+ students, and I'm wrote a book on the topic for O'Reilly Media (June 2024). - Data-driven, technical marketer with 11 years experience, 8,000 experiments run, and $50m optimized across all 4 major growth channels: Paid Ads, Content, Conversion, Virality. - Author of Marketing Memetics, a book on evolutionary biology applied to creative testing. - Co-Founder at Vexpower, building simulator-based courses for data-driven marketers. - Ex-Founder at Ladder, we built a team of 50 people, and helped over 200 companies grow in the US and EU, including Monzo Bank, Facebook, Nestle, Time Out, and Booking.com. - Experienced an AdTech exit to Adobe, acquired over 1m subscribers at Travelzoo, survived 2 Google algorithm updates at ShopStyle and scaled acquisition 30x at SumoMe. - Taught marketing at General Assembly, Startup Institute, and created the Excel for Marketers course on LinkedIn Learning, along with 6 others that have been taken by 300,000+ people.
I got access to GPT-3 in 2020 and DALL-E in 2022 and have been automating my work with AI ever since! I created a Udemy course on Prompt Engineering with 50k+ students, and have written a book on Prompt Engineering for O'Reilly (June 2024). I work full time as a freelance AI engineer as well as on my own generative AI projects.
I founded and grew Ladder, a growth marketing agency to over 50 employees in three countries, helping companies like Monzo Bank, Time Out and Booking.com as well as 200 or so other startups. I was an early adopter of Growth Hacking techniques and learned to code when Optimizely came to Europe so I could roll out my own A/B tests without needing IT. I've also met Sean Ellis and other prominent Growth Hackers, and worked for Noah Kagan at SumoMe.
I have 10 years experience with $50m spent on PPC. At Ladder I've grown 200+ clients including Monzo Bank, Time Out and Booking.com. I optimized $10m a year on Google for Carphone Warehouse at Efficient Frontier (acquired by Adobe) and grew PPC from 1% of total revenue to 6% at ShopStyle. I was an early Facebook advertiser at Travelzoo (Groupon competitor) acquiring 1m subscribers, scaled acquisition at SumoMe (founded by Noah Kagan) by 30x, and even ran Facebook ads for Facebook (Workplace).
Having worked with over 200 startups in the past five years through Ladder, a growth marketing agency I founded, I've seen enough technology stacks and the issues with them to be able to help give some guidance in the majority of scenarios. Specifically I'm best at tag management and set up of tracking / analytics, and I've done enough CRM to know the commonalities of how they all work.
I started advertising on Adroll at SumoMe, and have experimented with it multiple times across the 200 clients we've worked with at Ladder, an agency I co-founded. I actually now have Criteo as a client, a direct competitor, and therefore have done a lot of competitive research into its strengths and weaknesses.
My first job was at Efficient Frontier (acquired by Adobe) where I optimized $10m a year on Google for Carphone Warehouse and others. I then joined Travelzoo where amongst other media and landing page optimization, I managed their $4m a year PPC budget. After that I grew PPC from 1% of total revenue to 6% at ShopStyle, then founded my own agency, Ladder, where I've worked with over 200 clients on PPC, including Monzo Bank, Time Out and Booking.com.
Ahrefs is my SEO tool of choice - I have run many manual checks over the years and their data is the most consistent. I also prefer the UI and it isn't bloated like other tools when it comes to features. I use it primarily for keyword research, but it is also very useful for linkbuilding strategies (which actually was what it was originally known for, before they upped their game on keywords).
I have been running campaigns on Bing for a decade, and worked directly with them as one of the UK's largest advertisers for a while. I was an active spender during the shift to Yahoo account management and most of the 200 clients I've worked with at Ladder, the agency I co-founded, have experimented with Bing.
This is one of my favorite rarely tested channels. You can get really premium inventory particularly if you're targeting designers, developers or marketers. It is a little difficult to buy on vs the self-serve Google and Facebook platforms, but in particular the email sponsorship has worked well for me. When Crypto was a thing I spent a lot of money on BuySellAds as they had the Crypto package, in some cases achieving <0.5 cents cost per click and 5% CTR (unheard of in display ads!).
I was an early Facebook advertiser at Travelzoo (Groupon competitor) acquiring 1m subscribers, scaled acquisition at SumoMe (founded by Noah Kagan) by 30x, and even ran Facebook ads for Facebook (Workplace). As the co-founder of Ladder, a growth marketing agency, I have scaled campaigns up to $500k a month, and have worked with clients like Monzo Bank, Time Out and Booking.com.
I'm a power user of Google Data Studio having transitioned our entire agency (50 employees) across to it from an internal system we built in-house. I have set up many custom reports and dashboards for clients, including connecting to BigQuery, or custom population of spreadsheets as sources for things like cohort analysis. I have built GDS reports for companies like Monzo Bank, Time Out and Booking.com.
I'm a Google Tag Manager power user, having used it on something like 200 clients through Ladder, the agency I co-founded. I even set up Google Tag Manager for a major fast food brand late one night when another agency couldn't find anyone who knew it! I know how to code basic JavaScript for custom setups, and am competent in working with developers for any advanced needs. I also have experience with other tag management solutions such as Segment, and before that Qubit and others.
I have used Hotjar for a long time, and competed against them somewhat when I worked for SumoMe. I have worked with over 200 startups at Ladder, a growth agency I founded, and for most of them we installed and used Hotjar actively for insights in CRO.
I have worked with HubSpot as my own CRM in the growth marketing agency I founded, Ladder. We are getting something like 300 leads a month through inbound marketing and I'm familiar with the various workflows needed to integrate HubSpot with other services, including attributing marketing for the full funnel. I have also worked on HubSpot for clients, including a wedding company with over 50 venues.
I have used Intercom for both clients and my own company, having launched several SaaS tools and scaled them to over 1,000 users. I have built several end to end tracking installations with Intercom, and I'm familiar with how to connect it to other services, as well as set up complex behavioral email loops.
My experience with JavaScript is mainly in setting up tracking events on websites, custom coding for front-end A/B tests (implemented via Optimizely, VWO or Google Optimize) and setting up automations in Google Ads Scripts.
I have run LinkedIn campaigns for years, including for some big names like Booking.com, which are one of the largest LinkedIn advertisers in Europe. I've worked directly with LinkedIn account reps and have experience with a variety of ad formats.
I have worked with Mailchimp for years, both for my own newsletters and behavioral emails, and on behalf of clients at Ladder, the growth marketing agency I founded. This is the email platform I have the most experience with, though I have also worked with several others.
I have a lot of Mixpanel experience, having worked directly with them as a partner agency in the implementation of several complex mobile app clients. One of the clients I built the setup for was a new French bank, post-GDPR, so I had to navigate through the many ways they store data and help their legal team interpret the risk vs benefit of several major analytics decisions.
I have basic SQL experience - enough to pull the data I need - then I usually export into another platform to analyze with Python or in a spreadsheet.
I'm a semi-competent Python developer with a focus on Data Science, and have built simple Django apps and workflow automations. I mostly use Python for advanced analysis though I also have entry level experience in machine learning applied to marketing.
We tried out Quora ads early on and saw good success, in particular for clients like Booking.com on the B2B side. It is still a relatively early platform so has rarely been a big source of traffic for the 200 or so clients I've worked with at Ladder, but it does well enough to be worth testing.
I have used Segment many times for multiple clients in spaces like financial services (including launching a new bank in France) and also for my own in-house products. I mostly use it in scenarios where the client is on mobile, has offline events, or has advanced analytics needs, for example dumping raw data into Google BigQuery and/or Mode Analytics for advanced analysis via SQL and Python.
I have used Twitter pretty regularly as an ads platform since starting my agency, Ladder. In some cases we have gotten it to be a better source of traffic with more volume than Facebook, though that is admittedly rare and depends on the type of client.
I founded a growth marketing agency, Ladder, who became a partner agency of Unbounce, and have sent people from my team to their conference. We have used Unbounce for Fortune 500 clients all the way down to early stage startups, and have built several custom pages with unique setups.
After leaving the 50 person marketing agency I co-founded in 2020, I started playing around with GPT-3 beta and later DALL-E and Midjourney. I slowly automated every part of my work and eventually went full time on AI across various projects. I'm writing a book for O'Reilly Media on Prompt Engineering for Generative AI, and have a Udemy course on the same topic with 5k+ students.
Currently in the final editing phase for my second book for O'Reilly, Context Engineering with DSPy. I'm covering context engineering techniques to avoid context rot, using DSPy's modular structure to showcase different solutions. We cover DSPys signature-based approach to building pipelines, and its powerful optimizers, as well as how to build effective eval metrics and training datasets.
Working across teams to help people build personal benchmarks for evaluating new models from the major AI labs. Teaching AI agents to compound their knowledge of users to self-improve and optimize skills.
Simulator-based courses for data-driven marketers who want to be more technical. Learn creative testing, marketing mix modeling, RFM analysis, pricing strategy, media optimization and more.
Data-driven Marketer with $50m spent and 8,000 experiments run — Michael Taylor — shares a powerful approach to improving brand performance through creative testing. Learn how to break campaigns down to their component parts, or ‘memes’, and remix what works to drive growth.
Leading AI consulting engagements with technology teams and keeping Every at the frontier of AI capability — designing training, delivering client work, and collaborating with major research labs.
Saxifrage is my solo consulting/freelance business, where I run Prompt Engineering experiments with Generative AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, as well as open source models. I work with a select handful of clients on a fractional basis, hands-on in jupyter notebooks or deploying directly embedded in your engineering team. Built several products including an e-learning simulation platform Vexpower.com. Also created one of the top AI courses on Udemy, The Complete Prompt Engineering Bootcamp, taken by over 350,000 students.
Virtual focus-group simulator with AI agents for synthetic market research. https://askrally.com Built the initial prototype and handled all R&D and evals using DSPy for automated persona calibration, featured in the DSPy documentation. Scaled to 5,000 parallel persona queries for a few larger enterprise projects. Supabase Postgres and Redis with FastAPI backend, React Vite with Tailwind frontend. Launched and grew to 6,000 users and 200 paying customers, still active as a side project.
Co-authored Prompt Engineering for Generative AI, a comprehensive guide on prompt engineering for large language models (LLMs) and diffusion models such as ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion. - Focused on the application of LangChain and OpenAI models, providing in-depth insights and practical examples. - Developed the "Five Principles of Prompting," including giving direction, specifying format, providing examples, evaluating quality, and dividing labor. - Contributed to the codebase, ensuring compatibility and stability across different Python versions. - Created Jupyter notebooks and Python scripts to demonstrate advanced techniques. - Engaged with the community through the BrightPool GitHub repository, encouraging contributions and feedback.
Growth marketing agency with 50 people in the US, UK and EU where we've helped grow over 200 clients such as Monzo Bank, Booking.com and Time Out across major digital channels.
I ran paid user acquisition, scaling Facebook ads by over 30x whilst halving CPA; helping grow the SumoMe install base from 85,000 to 210,000 websites.
I was responsible for setting and delivering brand, marketing and product strategy for ShopStyle in the UK. Areas of responsibility include PPC, SEO, email, display, social media, PR and website conversion optimization.
My role was to ensure the global marketing teams' product requirements were coordinated, prioritized and executed effectively. This means using data analysis, testing and effective communication to drive product improvements, with the goal of improving Travelzoo's marketing acquisition and retention efforts across North America and Europe.
I was responsible for identifying, planning and optimizing new subscriber acquisition strategies for the Top 20, Newsflash and Local Deals products. I also contributed to management of Travelzoo's award-winning Facebook page, running all paid social activity. I was chiefly responsible for Paid Search (8th largest travel advertiser as noted by Search Engine Land) and analysis of website & email performance.
The associate account manager role was a client-facing position with heavy emphasis on analysis and strategy. I worked with some of the largest online advertisers in retail, travel and finance (over $15 million total annual spend) to drive performance in auction-based advertising environments: search, display and social media. I was also involved in new client acquisition, conducting pre-sales analysis contributing towards signing nine new clients.
The client manager role was sales-oriented with the main focus being client retention and reactivation of dormant accounts. As well as making cold calls and developing sales scripts, it involved being a point of contact for active clients; helping them interpret movements in foreign currencies and building trust to ensure we didn't lose transactions to competitors.
I worked at the Department for Work and Pensions as part of the Government Economic Service's Summer Internship program, to gain experience in the workplace and save money for my Masters degree. The role required extensive use of Excel, Word and Powerpoint, as well as basic use of SAS (statistical software). I also attended a 3 day Economic Conference.
