Proactive data health for small business

Problem

Small businesses were facing a new category of cost and risk from data privacy regulation (CCPA, GDPR) with no affordable way to meet it. Compliance meant either expensive legal counsel or generic, unreadable boilerplate policies that did nothing to build customer trust. There was no product built specifically to give a small business both a compliant policy and a genuinely good customer experience around it.

Summary

Pulse Privacy was the flagship SaaS product built inside BEACON, the data privacy company I cofounded with Joe Toscano in 2018. Where BEACON’s broader practice focused on policy strategy and audits, Pulse Privacy was the software: a subscription tool that let a small business generate, manage, and publish its legal policies without a lawyer or developer.

What we built:

A custom terms & policy generator that walked a business owner through their data collection, tracking, and third-party sharing practices and produced a plain-language legal policy
A member dashboard for managing, updating, and downloading (as branded PDF) all of a business’s legal documents in one place
An embeddable “Pulse Privacy Center” experience that businesses could drop into their own site or app to give their customers a readable summary of what data is collected and why
An early consumer-facing consent framework, with granular toggles for what a customer agrees to share and for how long, designed to make consent something a person could actually understand instead of a wall of legal text

My role: Cofounder and product design/development lead for the MVP. I led product strategy, UX, and the no-code/low-code build (Webflow front end, Airtable-backed data, Memberstack for accounts, Zapier for automation), and wrote the business plan and investor materials.

Target customer: Established small businesses and startups with at least $15M in annual revenue and/or handling 50,000+ users’ data — companies for whom the new cost of privacy compliance (estimated at $50K–$450K annually) was a real, unbudgeted threat.

Tools included:

Outcomes

Designed and built an MVP covering the full product loop: policy generator, member dashboard, and embeddable privacy center experience
Built and validated a subscription pricing model (Starter/Business/Unlimited tiers) and a full go-to-market and financial plan for an angel/SAFE fundraising round
Prototyped a next-generation consumer consent framework (granular, toggle-based data-sharing agreements) as the seed for Pulse Privacy v2
Product and business plan materials were used to pursue an angel/SAFE funding round for Pulse Privacy in 2020, targeting a $600K raise