Product engineering · Growth · Applied AI
Thirty years.
Four industries.
The same job
every time.
Find the thing a category hasn't worked out yet — then build it, take it to market, and prove it moved the number. Shor Consulting is the senior practice David Shor runs to do that work inside other people's companies, as a fractional executive or a focused engagement.
What we do
Three practices that only work together.
Most firms sell one of these. The reason the same person should hold all three is that a product nobody can find, a campaign pointed at the wrong buyer, and a dashboard nobody acts on are all the same failure wearing different clothes.
Tech Product Engineering & Development
Senior technical leadership and architecture for products that have to hold real workloads and real compliance.
Recently A multi-tenant diagnostics platform with six role-scoped portals, HL7 v2 and FHIR R4 interoperability, and a 170-module workflow engine that turns a clinical protocol into configuration instead of a release.
Customer Acquisition & Retention Marketing
Demand you can trace to revenue — built from the unit economics up, not from the channel down.
Recently Rebuilt acquisition for a $135M retailer and re-forecast a $5.5M media plan from the unit economics up, after correcting an average-order assumption nobody had questioned.
AI/ML, Analytics & Business Intelligence
Models that make a decision someone acts on — and a hard line about where AI does not belong.
Recently A regression model over every US short-term rental listing and MLS sale, segmented 40 ways by ZIP code, that tells an investor which house to buy and which amenities actually move nightly rate.
How we work
Three ways in.
Teams are assembled per engagement from people we've shipped with before — not a bench we need to keep busy.
Fractional CTO
Embedded technical leadership. Architecture, vendor and build decisions, hiring the team that outlasts the engagement, and getting a real thing into a real environment early.
3–12 months · Embedded
Fractional CGO
Own the number. Positioning, channel mix, the acquisition and retention machine, the analytics behind it, and the people to run it once it works.
3–12 months · Embedded
Diagnostic Sprint
Four to six weeks, fixed fee. What's actually wrong, what it would take to fix, what it's worth, and a roadmap your team can run without us. Often the right first step.
4–6 weeks · Fixed fee
Selected work
Four times into a category before it existed.
A career told as chapters, because that's how it happened — each one a product or a model that wasn't there before, in an industry that hadn't asked for it yet.
Variable Universal Life
Product design · Retirement plans A VUL design returning greater than 100% cash value, built to satisfy GAAP accounting — which made VUL the default instrument for non-qualified retirement plans for more than a decade. Read the case → 2000sMira Outdoor Media
Founder · Out-of-home media A one-million-location eye-level billboard network wired to census-block-level targeting — the first time out-of-home could be bought like direct response. Entertainment, CPG and local services followed. Read the case → 2009–2010Wingman Media & Quillion
Digital marketing · Wongdoody Performance media, affiliate and lead-verification infrastructure run as the digital arm serving Wongdoody — the operating grammar that became Prove. Overview 2010–2019Prove
Founder & CEO · Performance marketing A performance practice built on first-party ad serving while the industry was still renting third-party cookies. Medtronic, Abbott, GE, Arctic Cat, Monoprice, Rosland Capital, Southern California Edison, MGM Mirage. Read the case → 2020–2021World Back to Work
Founder · Return-to-work health services Contact tracing, managed quarantine, testing and a 24/7 US call center, stood up in weeks. Intel, Jerry Bruckheimer Films, AEG Goldenvoice, Tootsie Roll, two college systems. Overview 2018–2026Wanderhome
Founder · Short-term rental investing Buy the right house, not the pretty one. A model over AirDNA and MLS data across 40 segments × ZIP code. The concept test doubled revenue on the same property. Overview 2023–nowDiagnostic.ly
Chairman & CTO · At-home diagnostics Healthcare organised around the patient's kitchen table rather than the building — and the treatment, the prescription and the confirmatory retest that a diagnosis is supposed to trigger. Read the case → 2026–nowVelocity AI Ventures
Co-founder · AI product studio An AI-first engineering studio: senior humans as leads and reviewers, AI producing the code, tests and documentation under direction. Both our own products and clients'. Overview 2018–nowTidy Haus
Founder · Digital life organizing A consumer service, and a proving ground: self-hosted ERP and CRM, Stripe and calendar automation, and paid-search testing down to the keyword. OverviewWork has reached
Medtronic · Abbott · Cedars-Sinai · Providence · Southern California Edison · MGM Mirage · General Electric · Qualcomm · Siemens · Thomson Reuters · Fidelity · Hyundai · MannKind · Natera · Intel · USC · Arctic Cat · Monoprice · Rosland Capital · Peet's Coffee
Across thirty years and four companies, directly and through agency partners. More than 150 organisations in financial services, healthcare, energy, automotive, higher education, travel, retail, CPG and SaaS.
Start here
Tell me what you're working on.
The useful first conversation is usually thirty minutes and specific: what you're trying to move, what you've already tried, and what's in the way. If it isn't something we should do, I'll say so and point you at who should.