Justin
Eigenmann

What started as a summer experiment in short-form content turned into a crash course in performance marketing. I began producing videos for products across affiliate networks, treating every post like an A/B test: hook variations, pacing, CTA placement, thumbnail framing. The data told me what worked. It grew fast enough that I started a group with likeminded creators, and what began as a side project became something more serious.

Individually, I've built 100+ affiliate partnerships and negotiated custom commission structures with brands, driving over $1M in tracked sales. The conversion lifts (500% to 5,000% depending on the product) didn't come from luck. They came from reading the analytics, killing what underperformed, and doubling down on creative patterns the numbers validated. It's the same loop I use in SAS and SQL, just applied to 30-second videos.

Not every job on a résumé is meant to be the highlight. This one taught me operations under pressure. Valet work during high-traffic events is a logistics problem disguised as a service job: 100+ vehicles moving through a finite space, every key tracked, every guest watching the clock.

I learned to read flow patterns the same way I'd later read a dashboard. Where are the bottlenecks? Which lane clears fastest? What's the cost of one misplaced key versus one slow handoff? Over 18 months I helped coordinate ingress and egress for events without a single damage incident, which sounds simple until you've done it on a Saturday night with a line of cars stretching down the block.

It's not a data job. But it's where I started thinking like one: spotting inefficiencies, building systems to handle them, and trusting routines over improvisation when the pressure climbs.

Everyone's got a first real job. This was mine. Before the dashboards and the affiliate networks and the SAS models, I was stocking shelves at Publix, rotating product by date, and learning that "fast-paced retail" is corporate shorthand for "the line never stops moving."

It's the kind of job that teaches you things no classroom does. How to read a customer's mood in three seconds. How to recover when you've miscounted inventory and the truck is already pulling away. How to keep a department clean and organized when twelve other things are demanding your attention.

None of it shows up on a résumé in a way that sounds impressive, but all of it shaped how I work now: show up early, stay organized, own your mistakes, and treat the unglamorous parts like they matter, because they usually do.

DoorDash paid the bills before this. Publix is where I learned what it actually meant to have a job.