Hear the full founder story in his own words. This blog post is based on an in-depth podcast interview where LayerFive’s founder shares the complete journey, technical insights, and lessons learned from building a marketing intelligence platform.

How One Founder Discovered the $140 Billion Marketing Attribution Problem—And Built a Solution to Solve It

The digital marketing industry is hemorrhaging money. With $140 billion spent annually on digital advertising in the United States alone, research consistently shows that 47% of marketing spend is wasted due to poor attribution, fragmented data, and platform reporting inaccuracies. But how did we get here, and more importantly, how can marketers fix it?

In a revealing conversation, the founder of LayerFive shares his unconventional journey from fixing assembly lines in a refrigerator plant to building a unified marketing intelligence platform that’s helping brands achieve 72% revenue increases with only 7% more ad spend.

The Unconventional Path to Marketing Technology

Most marketing technology founders don’t start their careers as electrical engineers on a factory floor. But for LayerFive’s founder, that’s exactly where the journey began—and it taught him invaluable lessons about identifying inefficiencies and solving systemic problems.

From Assembly Lines to Silicon Valley

“I started my career as an electrical engineer on a refrigerator plant assembly line, fixing assembly lines and keeping them running,” the founder recalls. Within nine months, he recognized that the future wasn’t on assembly lines—it was in technology. This pivotal realization led him to shift careers, spending years at Deloitte serving large clients across public sector, tech, and healthcare industries.

But it was his fascination with marketing technology’s wide radius of impact that truly changed his trajectory. “Marketing is something as a function that touches every business, whether it’s small or large businesses,” he explains. This universal applicability drew him to join BrightEdge, an SEO startup in the Bay Area, marking his entry into the marketing technology world.

The Attribution Crisis: Three Critical Observations

Through his work across SEO, ad tech, and marketing consulting roles, the founder made three critical observations that would ultimately lead to LayerFive’s creation:

1. The Credit Attribution Battle

At the SEO company, he witnessed firsthand how SEO teams struggled to get proper credit for their efforts. When users searched for a brand name, they often saw branded ads before organic search results—meaning SEO teams felt their hard work was being attributed to paid advertising instead.

“SEO guys will always complain about how we are not getting the credit for our efforts,” he notes. This wasn’t just an internal politics issue—it was a fundamental problem with how marketing platforms measured and reported performance.

2. The Platform Reporting Fallacy

Moving to an ad tech company serving large retailers, he observed companies spending tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising while making all their decisions based solely on what individual platforms like Google or Meta reported.

“As a tech guy, I could see the fallacy in that. You really do not know if that particular platform provided you that kind of return because you are not seeing a user’s full journey. You do not know if somebody may have come from a Google ad but then they may have come from an email, they may have come from a text before they converted.”

The problem became even more apparent when he saw one retailer paying $30,000 monthly for what was marketed as “omni-channel attribution”—when in reality, the solution only attributed between two channels: Google and Meta.

“Obviously I saw that people are paying a lot of money for a very flawed solution,” he observes.

3. The Identity Resolution Gap

In a marketing consulting role serving a large US financial services client, he encountered the third piece of the puzzle: companies couldn’t even identify visitors who had logged into their sites, let alone anonymous visitors.

“There was this data problem going on in their own data sets,” he explains. “Retailers and advertisers are making decisions on half-cooked data when it comes to their ad spend decisions. Plus, they are not being very effective in their retargeting or onsite personalization because they do not understand who the visitors are who are visiting their site.”

These three observations revealed a massive white space in the market: if better ID resolution could solve these interconnected problems, there was a viable product opportunity.

Building LayerFive: Solving the 47% Marketing Waste Problem

Armed with these insights and his technical background, the founder set out to build what would become LayerFive—a unified marketing intelligence platform designed to solve the attribution, data fragmentation, and identity resolution challenges plaguing the industry.

The Technical Foundation: Rapid Development Through Smart Architecture

Leveraging his software development background from his early Silicon Valley startup days, the founder was uniquely positioned to build the initial product. “I put together the design for the product, I put together some of the architecture stuff, did some research,” he explains.

Working with just two engineers—a colleague with AI/ML expertise and someone he hired in India—the team built a working proof of concept in just four to five months. This lean, efficient approach allowed them to validate the core technology before committing significant resources.

The Target Market Pivot: From Enterprise to Mid-Market

Initially, the founder targeted large retailers and financial services companies—the organizations where he’d observed the problems firsthand. But he quickly discovered a critical barrier: procurement processes at enterprise companies created impossible timelines for a bootstrapped startup.

“For these large clients, they have pretty long procurement processes and for a startup like LayerFive it was impossible to break through all that procurement process unless I was ready to put a few million dollars behind it and get some kind of scale and name behind it.”

This led to a strategic pivot: start with smaller e-commerce clients, prove the value, build the product, and then return to larger enterprise opportunities with traction and credibility. Through referrals, the team secured initial e-commerce retailers as clients, which shaped the product into what it is today.

Today’s Platform: Serving Three Core Markets

LayerFive has evolved to serve three distinct target customer groups, each facing similar attribution and operational efficiency challenges:

• Marketing Agencies: Helping agencies unify marketing data and provide immediate insights to their clients while improving their own operational efficiency
• E-commerce Retailers: Mid-size retailers who need sophisticated attribution without enterprise-level budgets (with easy Shopify integration opening access to 100,000+ potential customers)
• B2B SaaS Companies: Organizations with complex funnels that vary between product-led growth (PLG) and sales-led growth (SLG) models

The Technology: How LayerFive Solves Attribution

At the heart of LayerFive’s solution is its approach to identity resolution—the ability to recognize the same individual across multiple devices, browsers, and customer touchpoints. The founder uses a compelling analogy to explain the problem:

The Mom and Pop Store Problem Online

“Think about a neighborhood mom and pop store. That owner probably knows you. If you walk in, that owner is greeting you with your name or already knows what you typically buy. Even if you go to that store in a Halloween costume, the chances are that the owner is gonna recognize you.”

This simple recognition becomes incredibly complex online. When someone visits Macy’s.com, for example, they might use different browsers, different devices, or have cookies wiped out due to privacy restrictions. Without proper identity resolution, each visit appears to be from a different person—making personalization and accurate attribution impossible.

LayerFive’s Identity Resolution Approach

LayerFive’s technology uses multiple techniques to identify and connect visitor journeys:

• First-party tracking tags to monitor individual interactions with websites, apps, and owned media properties
• Deterministic matching when users log in, provide emails, or click through from email/SMS campaigns
• Patent-pending AI software using probabilistic matching to connect journeys across different browsers and devices based on behavioral patterns
• Integration with e-commerce platforms, CRM systems, loyalty programs, and customer support tools

This comprehensive approach allows LayerFive to track a customer who first visits via a Google ad on their phone, returns directly on their laptop browser, and finally converts—properly attributing the conversion to the original Google ad instead of incorrectly crediting direct traffic.

The AI Context Problem: Why Identity Resolution Matters More Than Ever

The founder points to a critical MIT study from July 2025 about the state of generative AI in enterprises, which found that 95% of GenAI implementations are failing—with only 5% achieving success.

The main reason? Lack of context.

“AI is hungry for context. To solve that, you have to have highly accurate contextual data that you can feed to AI. And to get highly accurate contextual data, you have to do ID resolution so that you can connect the dots as much as possible that then you can feed to AI.”

This makes identity resolution even more critical in the age of agentic AI. Without properly connected customer journey data, AI tools can’t provide meaningful insights or automation. As the founder succinctly puts it: “If you give them crap, they are gonna give you crap.”

Proven Results: The Billy Footwear Case Study

While the technology is sophisticated, the results speak for themselves. Billy Footwear, a LayerFive client, provides a compelling example of what proper attribution and data unification can achieve:

• 72% revenue increase year-over-year
• Only 7% increase in ad spend
• Massive improvement in marketing efficiency and ROAS (Return on Ad Spend)

This wasn’t achieved through revolutionary creative or aggressive expansion—it came from simply understanding which marketing channels actually drove conversions and reallocating budget accordingly. When you know what’s working, you can do more of it without wasteful spending.

The Complete LayerFive Product Suite

Today, LayerFive offers four integrated products that address the full spectrum of marketing intelligence needs:

Axis: Unified Marketing Data and Reporting

Replaces expensive tool stacks like Supermetrics, Funnel.io, Looker, and PowerBI by unifying all marketing and advertising data sources. Allows marketers and data analysts to focus on insights rather than data wrangling, with custom dashboards and automated reporting.

Signal: Attribution and Analytics

Provides multi-touch attribution, media mix modeling, funnel insights, and customer journey analytics through the L5 Pixel for granular first-party data collection. Helps marketers understand which channels truly perform, the halo effect of advertising, and where to allocate their next marketing dollar.

Edge: Visitor Intelligence and Predictive Audiences

Uses cutting-edge AI to score every visitor for engagement and purchase propensity, build predictive audiences, and enable activation across multiple channels. Addresses the problem that most e-commerce businesses recognize less than 10% of their site traffic, allowing marketers to 2-5X their visitor recognition.

Navigator: Agentic AI Automation

The AI layer across all LayerFive products that uncovers performance trends, provides insights on demand, enables agentic workflows through MCP server integration, and automates communications to teams via Slack or clients via email.

Lessons for Aspiring Founders

When asked what advice he’d give his 18-year-old self, the founder shares three powerful lessons that apply to any entrepreneurial journey:

1. Everything Will Be Better Than You Imagine

“I’ll tell my 18-year-old self that everything is gonna be much better than what you can even imagine today. So do not stress out on small things. Look at the bigger picture and everything will be all right.”

2. Take Risks While You’re Young

“Take risk now, you have the age on your side. If you want to build out something on your own, go do it now rather than waiting for ‘I need to get more money, I need to get a career before I can do something.’ If you got an idea, work on it now.”

He admits he regrets not acting on ideas he had at 21, emphasizing that youth provides the perfect opportunity to experiment and fail without major consequences.

3. Invest in Relationships

“Spend time on relationships. As an 18-year-old, I was probably too cocky, not really paying attention to all the relationships in life—whether it’s family, friends, mentors. Spend time on those, nurture those, treasure those.”

Throughout his journey building LayerFive, mentors played crucial roles—from former bosses who introduced him to potential customers, to agency owners who asked the hard questions that forced him to clarify his differentiation, to sales masters who transformed his approach to selling.

The Future: Unified Marketing Intelligence in the AI Era

As agentic AI transforms how marketing and advertising work, the need for high-quality, unified, contextual marketing data has never been greater. LayerFive’s vision is to become the backbone for contextual data that feeds all marketing activities—from planning and budgeting to creative insights, performance understanding, and 1:1 marketing at scale.

The goal is ambitious but clear: enable marketers to become 10X more efficient in the agentic AI era through:

• Fast, real-time access to unified marketing data for quick, accurate decisions
• Contextual ID-resolved data with maximum funnel coverage for proactive 1:1 outreach
• Full advantage of agentic AI workflows for automated insights and actions

For an industry wasting 47% of its $140 billion in annual spend, this transformation can’t come soon enough.

Key Takeaways

• The digital marketing industry wastes 47% of spend ($66+ billion annually) due to poor attribution and fragmented data
• 51% of CTOs and chief data officers don’t trust the data they receive from marketing platforms
• Identity resolution is the foundation for accurate attribution and AI effectiveness—without it, AI implementations fail 95% of the time
• Unified marketing intelligence platforms like LayerFive can drive 72% revenue increases with minimal additional ad spend by simply showing what actually works
• Mid-market companies can now access enterprise-level attribution and analytics without enterprise-level budgets or technical complexity
• In the age of agentic AI, context is everything—and context requires properly resolved, unified customer data

About LayerFive

LayerFive is a unified marketing intelligence platform that helps brands maximize the value of their consumer data through better attribution, identity resolution, and AI-powered insights. The platform serves marketing agencies, e-commerce retailers, and B2B SaaS companies looking to improve marketing ROI while reducing tool complexity and costs.

Visit layerfive.com to learn how you can reduce marketing waste, improve attribution accuracy, and enable agentic AI workflows with unified, contextual marketing data.