Data policies designed for humans
- 2018–2020
- BEACON
- Cofounder, CEO & Product Designer
- Cofounded with Joe Toscano
Raised $225k in pre-seed funding and turned a Fortune 500 policy audit into a product small businesses could use.
Context
I cofounded BEACON with Joe Toscano in 2018. It was a data privacy company at the intersection of policy, research, and human-centered design. The aim was to help small and medium businesses make privacy protection something their customers could actually understand.
The problem
Data privacy policies are largely inaccessible. The average policy is written at a college reading level and buried in legal jargon. At the same time, CCPA and GDPR introduced a real compliance cost — estimated at $50K–$450K annually — that most small and medium businesses had no affordable way to meet. Consumers could not tell how their data was used. The businesses handling that data could not afford the counsel or the engineering to get compliant.
What I decided
Measure the problem before designing the product. I built an automated pipeline in Python, JavaScript, and AppleScript to scrape the privacy policies of every Fortune 500 company and score each one for reading accessibility. That dataset would drive the grading in the product, not a guessed rubric.
The company would then sell a tool a small business could run without a lawyer or a developer: generate the policy, manage it, and publish a readable version for customers. Advisors included Brittany Kaiser. Board members included the Intuit Chief Legal Officer and the former NY Assistant Attorney General. We partnered with Crownpeak to distribute an enterprise privacy front end through their marketplace.
What I made
Pulse Privacy was the software. I led product strategy, UX, and the no-code and low-code architecture: Webflow on the front end, Airtable for data, Memberstack for accounts, and Zapier for automation. I also wrote the business plan and the investor materials.
- A terms and policy generator that walked an owner through data collection, tracking, and third-party sharing, then produced a plain-language policy.
- A member dashboard for managing and downloading those documents, including a branded PDF.
- An embeddable Pulse Privacy Center a business could drop into its own site.
- An early consent framework with granular toggles for what a customer agrees to share, and for how long.
- A grading database built from the Fortune 500 audit.
The full audit experiment is in the playground: Fortune 500 privacy audit.
The target customer was an established small business or startup with at least $15M in annual revenue, or handling 50,000 or more people’s data.
What changed
- Raised $225k in pre-seed funding.
- Shipped an MVP across the policy generator, the dashboard, and the privacy center.
- Validated a subscription model with Starter, Business, and Unlimited tiers, plus a go-to-market and financial plan.
- Put the Crownpeak partnership in place.
- Used the product and the plan to pursue an angel and SAFE round in 2020, targeting a $600K raise.
- Cataloged Fortune 500 policy readability data and used it in the grading system.
Proof
The audit, the product screens, and the $225k pre-seed are the record of what worked.
The company did not continue. The cofounders diverged on roadmap and focus, so we wound BEACON down by mutual agreement, returned investor funds, and placed the IP with teams who could continue it. That ending is part of how I run product now: agree the focus with the people building it before the work gets expensive, and treat capital as something to give back if the roadmap splits.