TL;DR
Mid-2019, an obscure email came my way via a friend of a friend.
Hey Logan,
I’m doing consulting for a startup out of NYC called KOALA. We’re looking to disrupt the timeshare industry by providing a P2P platform for owners to rent their units out. To date the industry is very outdated and rentals of timeshares only occur on closed exchanges only available to other owners. By providing a platform and partnering with resorts like Hyatt, SPG and more we’re tapping into a market that has not been available to the general public.
I knew virtually nothing about this project, but I did know about the borderline-shady world of timeshare sales through my own uncle’s experience as an industry insider. The words “we’re looking to disrupt” jumped at me.
At the time I had just abruptly left my well-paying gig due with a finance company I deemed less than ethical (pre-Tipalti), so the chance to work on positive disruption sounded like a breath of fresh air.
I scheduled a call with James Burbridge, COO and co-founder without even realizing that I would be teaming up on an unfunded company without a marketing budget to pay me with and little more than a big idea and a domain name (that’s right… SEO without a website).
James made a really great impression. He could only offer shares in lieu of cash, but the whole thing clicked (and I get super pumped whenever I get to build SEO at the foundation instead of trying to back-engineer a horrendously bad website). No cash, no matter. I was in.
Funding & Setup in NYC (Jan 2020)
January 2020. The height of pandemic. I hop on a weekend flight to meet Koala’s founding team in-person. Over the weekend, we spend full-day sessions planning the website foundation and preparing for Koala’s initial investment round.
I had an epic time meeting the team, learning CEO Mike Kennedy’s backstory (he literally lived my dream touring on lead guitar for Visions of Disorder), and being in the ‘war room’ with what I knew were big things on the horizon. We spanned everything from high-level company strategy to nitty-gritty site architecture details and SEO opportunity mapping.
When the investors arrived, Mike and James Burbridge (COO) presented Koala’s pitch beautifully. I chimed in only briefly during moments when SEO arose in the conversation, and I had a moment aside with one of the main investors who had been asking about the SEO landscape to show more of my data in more detail. Likely a smaller slice of the investors’ decision-making process, but one that he reacted very positively to nonetheless.
Consulting to Page 1 Disruption (2020-2022)
Our pre-seed round was funded and I remained in San Francisco through the rest of the pandemic, consulting regularly with the team in the earlier NYC AM hours to maintain good separation of time with my role at Tipalti. During this period of time, we were able to quickly and aggressively grow Koala’s Resort directory and editorial articles, with an insanely fast ride to achieving #1-2 positions for Koala’s most valuable keyword “timeshare rentals.”
Then, on August 3rd, 2020 KOALA closed their Series A funding round at $3.43 million. Just seven hours before the travel ban. I was stuck in San Francisco, but I was absolutely stoked when I heard the news!
Shortly after that milestone, I helped Koala’s homepage get ranked for “Koala” alongside the more animal-friendly sites like National Geographic and Wikipedia, but the move that created the most conversion uplift during this time was soon to follow.
By now, I had also been aiding Koala with their link acquisition and digital PR campaigns + training their internal editorial team on an SEO focused content roadmap. Close collaboration with CTO Chris Johnson had already set Koala’s technical infrastructure and Resorts directory up for success. Performance was climbing, but it was time for another big injection… destination pages.
My research supported significant search opportunities across all of Koala’s top states, cities and destinations.
- timeshare rentals orlando
- timeshare rentals in hawaii
- aruba timeshare rentals
- etc.
- etc.
I presented my research to the team, and we went to work building out this new programmatic wing for destination pages with specific location-based timeshare deals and rich information.
To this day, our destinations directory is Koala’s second-highest converting group next to the Resorts directory.
A Break from Koala’s Partnership (Jul 2022)
By July of 2022, my role at Tipalti had expanded and I needed to double-down my focus as my role and team were rapidly expanding. Much as I genuinely enjoyed helping Koala establish their SEO program during my off-hours, it was becoming clear to me that I wasn’t going to be able to continue supporting Koala at the same clip as before, so I met with Mike and James to transition SEO and enable the internal team to move forward with the roadmap that we had built together while I put all my focus into successfully growing Tipalti’s demand gen team.
It was a bittersweet end to our extremely exciting and fulfilling partnership, but making the move was necessary for my expanded role and the increasing demands that came with Tipalti’s 15X growth trajectory.
I assumed that was that, and I would have to keep rooting for Koala on the sidelines from here on out.
As fate would have it, my partnership with Koala hadn’t actually reached its conclusion yet.
In 2023, I branched out to build my consultancy SaaStronomics. James and I would touch base from time to time, but my plate was usually too full to re-engage with Koala so we simply remained in touch while I continued to root for the team while building SaaStronomics.
Phase 2 Reignition (Jan 2025)
Toward the end of 2024, James and I reconnected again. This time, we were able to set aside enough operational bandwidth and budget to make Koala’s phase 2 partnership work. The stars were back in alignment!
In my absence, Koala’s SEO program was able to remain mostly steady, but they were experiencing noticeable slippage and James was eager to get the program back to growth mode.
As of this writing, it is now August, 2026 and we’ve been able to achieve the following Phase 2 milestones (with bigger opportunities still on our horizon):
- 220% Clicks Resurgence
- 130% Conversions Resurgence
- 420% Resources Growth
Traffic Growth Levers
Our 220% clicks resurgence has come about mainly through aggressive editorial expansion and publication cadence. In recent months, I’ve built an editorial workflow which has literally 5X’d our publication cadence and we’ve seen clicks from editorial content grow from 10% of total site traffic to 28% of total site traffic. A serious contributor to Koala’s 220% clicks resurgence.
Conversions Growth Levers
Upon re-engagement Koala did not have any dashboards I could pull from to understand conversion activity. I was relying purely on traffic data and speculation (not great). So I worked with their marketing opps specialist to build Koala’s SEO Visibility Dashboard telling him exactly what data we would need to begin understanding Koala’s SEO conversion patterns and how to construct the dashboard. Within a few weeks, I had my very first hands-on data dashboard helping be see conversion data across the various segments I needed to analyze.
Beyond our 220% clicks growth contributing to Koala’s conversion layers, a previous redesign project to Koala’s resources pages in collaboration with the CTO had also accounted for about 30% of the growth to conversions.
Future Expansion
I would be remiss if I ended the story here.
My partnership with Koala is ongoing and we’ve lined up much bigger expansion opportunities currently in the works, which are going to be at least 3X+ more impactful than the current phase 2 success metrics. The specifics of which, I can’t disclose due to competitive discretion.
Koala is one of the most exciting teams I’ve had the chance to work with, and we’ve got a lot more growth to come, so I’m aiming to revise this case study as our progress continues.
Make sure to keep an eye out!