John Custer Email & Phone Number

Williamsburg, Va, Us

Williamsburg, Va

AidData is a research lab at William & Mary's Global Research Institute. We equip policymakers and practitioners with better evidence to improve how sustainable development investments are targeted, monitored, and evaluated. We use rigorous methods, cutting-edge tools, and granular data to answer the question: who is doing what, where, for whom, and to what effect?

Seattle, Wa (Working Remotely)

At Coffee Catcher, LLC, I designed a custom coffee filter for manufacture at a US-based factory and developed and implemented an e-commerce strategy to distribute it, rapidly scaling operations from a kitchen table to a hyperefficient small business.Business Highlights:Developing, launching, and scaling a manufacturable product that has satisfied 30,000+ customers and generated almost $1M in revenue, becoming the market leader in a category we helped to create.Pivoting, re-pivoting, (re-re-pivoting), and seeing initial traction with a new line of businessPersonal Highlights (Recent): Front End Development - “Can you build it like this?”: I’ve grown comfortable with HTML, CSS, Javascript (as well as some server-side JS & PHP) and discovered that I love creating templates and micro frameworks.Lean Startup / Agile Development - “Validating the next domino”We built, tested, (discarded), and rebuilt our web platform (CMS / shopping cart, etc.) 4 times in the last 4 months as we’ve iterated on our business model hypotheses. Webmaster / Digital Strategy / SEO - “Robots are people too”With all that creative destruction, we’ve gotten pretty familiar with CPanel, DNS Management, Google Analytics & Google Webmaster Tools, API integration, schema.org and microdata.Systematizing Operations - ‘Moving pieces in concert’:In Q4, my focus is all about keeping our inventory management and supply chain humming, handling holiday order fulfillment, closing the books, and filing sales taxes. #harvest-seasonWhat I’ve learned:Being an entrepreneur requires you to learn new skills quickly and solve problems creatively. Bootstrapping a business makes you a more rigorous planner and a more disciplined operator. Learning to code forces you to develop cognitive flexibility and to think algorithmically.

Co-founded an Asia based team providing consulting and resource development support for multilingual education programs throughout the region.Facilitated the successful development of a new grant funded project model.Gained a new appreciation for change management strategies in large organizations.

Contract negotiation, networking and partnership development, strategy formulation, advocacy, resource development, team building and management

Facilitated strategic planning, composed annual report, liaised with partners--based in Dallas, TX and Washington, DC

80 hour a week summer job selling books--door to door, straight commission less business expenses; also included recruiting, training and managing a sales team

Msba, Master Of Science In Business Analytics, 3.77

William & Mary's MSBA program forms expert analysts, data scientists and business strategists through classes in machine learning.

Bs, International Business