James R.C. Smith · Marketing & communications leader · North Vancouver, BC

Marketing that moves revenue. Products that ship.

I lead marketing and communications for B2B SaaS, consumer brands, financial services, and tech. Then I go home and build the apps too. Ten years of turning strategy into results you can measure, and ideas into products people actually download.

Get in touchSee the work
James R.C. Smith sitting in a leather chair holding a camera
0%
social-driven revenue growth (BN3TH)
0M+
PR reach (Verge Agriculture)
0%
e-commerce growth (Urban Barn)
0
apps shipped, one with national press

Trusted with the work at

  • Coast Capital Savings
  • Nature's Path Organic Foods
  • Urban Barn
  • BN3TH
  • Cority
  • Verge Regenerative Agriculture
  • Ava Smart Gardens

Featured in

  • Men's Health
  • PR Newswire
  • Yahoo Finance
  • Sourcing Journal
  • Canadian Healthcare Network
  • North Shore News
  • Vancouver Is Awesome
  • Cantech Letter

The same operator, at every stage

The problems change depending on company size. The approach doesn't: find the real bottleneck, connect the teams and tools around it, and report on it in numbers a board will trust.

Selected work

Six stories, each with a problem, what I did, and what changed. The numbers are real and, where possible, publicly verifiable.

Financial services · Enterprise

Coast Capital Savings

The customer service team fielded calls in one standalone system while marketing handled similar customer questions on social. Neither side could see the other, and reporting was manual.

Developed, integrated, and migrated a new platform into Salesforce so the customer dashboard and intel were secure and shared across departments. Released website status notifications, fed social trends and topic notes to the service team, and tied social profiles to customer care where it made sense. Reporting went from a manual process to live, automated, and scheduled: downloadable reports delivered to the C-suite and board.

0%
drop in downtime complaints
0%
growth in social audience
0%
less reporting time

Reporting time: manual vs automated

Reporting time fell from an index of 100 when manual to 5 once automated, a 95% reduction.

95% reduction.

Downtime complaints: before vs after

Downtime complaints fell from an index of 100 before the work to 10 after, a 90% drop.

90% drop.

Consumer / DTC · Startup to scale

BN3TH

A challenger underwear brand needed cultural relevance and outbound PR for product and category launches.

Ran outbound PR for launches, built collaborations with NFL teams (San Francisco 49ers and Miami Dolphins), landed celebrity endorsements and partnerships including Jason Momoa's So iLL x On the Roam line, and ran athlete gifting programs. Built and managed a 300+ creator and affiliate network.

0%
social-driven revenue growth
0+
creators and affiliates in the network
National and international press pickup
Qualitative outcome
Grid of social stories from the BN3TH athlete gifting program, showing athletes unboxing product
Athlete gifting stories, captured and reshared across the brand channels.

Retail / home · B2C

Urban Barn

The best in-store moments, expert-led after-hours events, only reached the people who could physically attend.

Introduced Facebook Live streaming and a live video shopping hub, turning in-store expert events into online shopping events. Hosts included on-air talent known from shows like the Marilyn Denis morning show.

0M
views within one week, including replays (12M to 16M)
0
average live viewers at peak (10,000 to 15,000)
0%
e-commerce growth

Urban Barn viewership, one week

Average live viewers reached roughly 15,000 while total views over one week reached 16 million, shown in thousands.

Live audience compounds into replay reach.

CPG / consumer · B2C

Nature's Path Organic Foods

A wave of brand acquisitions of smaller local producers needed integrating, and the online shop was run externally at high cost.

Oversaw the brand acquisitions end to end: press releases, social media strategy and content production, team migration, account takeovers, and team development. Brought the online shop in-house.

$0
per month saved in fees and commissions
0%
global impression growth
Full in-house oversight and reporting
Qualitative outcome

$0

Saved every month in fees and commissions

Annualized: $360,000 per year.

Global impressions

360% growth over the period.

AgTech · B2B / Startup

Verge Regenerative Agriculture

An emerging category needed a clear voice and cross-functional coordination to launch well.

Led social media strategy and content creation, and ran cross-team collaboration between Finance, Paid Ads, Content Copywriting, and a website redesign.

0M+
PR reach
0
teams coordinated on one launch

0M+

PR reach

One launch, four teams, one voice.

B2B SaaS / EHS software · Enterprise

Cority

A category-leading enterprise SaaS brand going through launches, hires, acquisitions, and a full rebrand needed comms that kept pace.

Led social media, PR, and internal communications for new product launches, C-suite hires and role updates, a complete website rebrand and overhaul, company acquisitions and mergers, and introduced thought-leadership video interviews and hot-topic talking-head social content.

Full brand overhaul, recognized with a REBRAND 100 distinction
Qualitative outcome
Award-winning product comms: Verdantix Leader, E+E Leader, OH&S Industrial Hygiene, New Product of the Year
Qualitative outcome
  • REBRAND 100
  • Verdantix Leader
  • E+E Leader Award
  • OH&S Industrial Hygiene
  • New Product of the Year
  • Full website overhaul

Award nominations that win

I run the outreach and nomination process that gets brands recognized. Across BN3TH, Ava Smart Gardens, and Cority: Red Dot Design Awards, Forbes recognition, Environmental Impact awards, and a long shelf of EHS and sustainability wins.

Products I've built

I don't just market products. I ship them. Each of these started with a real problem I watched people describe online, then validated and built.

iOS app

Flint: ADHD Daily Planner

A daily planner built for ADHD brains, private, simple, and calm by design.

I have ADHD, and I kept hitting the same walls: planners scattered across too many apps, subscription traps, and blank screens that cause freeze instead of focus. I heard the same complaints echoed across Reddit and social, then built the fix.

  • Stoplight capacity check-in
  • Brain dump with AI task extraction
  • Overflow Tray and Timeline view
  • Voice capture and Projects
  • Six built-in routines
  • One-time purchase, no ads
  • Local-only storage
  • Apple "Data Not Collected"

Launched during Mental Health Awareness Month and picked up by Canadian Healthcare Network, PR Newswire (CNW), Yahoo Finance, Cantech Letter, North Shore News, Vancouver Is Awesome, Castanet, and The Peak. Market context: the global ADHD apps market was USD 1.9B in 2025 and is projected to reach USD 6.7B by 2033.

View on the App StoreRead the press
Three Flint app screens: a privacy-first overview, the brain dump capture list, and a day planned around a green capacity level

iOS app

WeatherBoard: Local Weather

Know what's coming. Know when to go.

Most weather apps are cluttered or alarmist. This one is calm and actually useful, with the safety layers North American users need. Made in Canada.

  • Worldwide forecasts
  • Activity planning
  • Air quality
  • Official alerts
  • Live wildfire tracking across North America
Get it on the App StoreRead the writeup
WeatherBoard app screen showing a sunny forecast, hourly strip, air quality index, and a wildfire alert map

Web app

PhotoResizer.ca

The fastest way to get a social post to the right size, every time.

Creators waste time hunting for current platform dimensions and resizing one post at a time. PhotoResizer keeps the latest sizes on hand and batches the work.

  • Current social platform presets
  • Size, fit, background, and export chained on one photo
  • AI tools: expand, background remove, upscale, convert, compress
  • Freemium with paid tiers
Try it free
PhotoResizer editor showing social platform size presets, fit and background controls, and a photo preview ready to export

I don't guess. I go find the problem.

Before I build anything, I read where people complain. I scrape and study Reddit threads, app reviews, and social comments to find the missing feature, the recurring frustration, the workaround everyone's tired of. Then I validate demand and build the smallest thing that fixes it. It's the same instinct I bring to client work: solve the real bottleneck, not the obvious one.

  1. 01

    Listen

    Reddit threads, app reviews, and social comments, read closely.

  2. 02

    Validate

    Test whether the frustration is real, repeated, and worth paying to fix.

  3. 03

    Ship

    Build the smallest thing that fixes it, then launch it properly.

In the press

Coverage earned for clients and for products I built myself.

About

I'm James R.C. Smith, a marketing and communications professional in North Vancouver with more than a decade across B2B SaaS, consumer brands, financial services, and tech. I've led social-driven revenue growth, creator and affiliate networks, earned media, e-commerce, and AI-assisted content systems. I also build my own products: apps and platforms that solve problems I've watched real people describe. I run SocialDad.ca and the SocialDad podcast, and I'm currently open to director-level marketing and communications roles, remote or hybrid in the Vancouver area.

What I do

Strategy

  • Brand and comms strategy
  • Positioning
  • Go-to-market
  • Integrated launches

Communications and PR

  • Earned media
  • Celebrity and sports partnerships
  • Award nominations
  • Internal comms
  • Executive and thought-leadership content

Growth

  • Social-driven revenue
  • Creator and affiliate networks
  • E-commerce
  • Paid and organic

Systems

  • Salesforce integration
  • Cross-team workflow
  • Automated board-level reporting
  • AI-assisted content

Product

  • Research-led discovery
  • App and platform builds
  • Launch and press

Let's talk.

Hiring for a senior or director-level marketing and comms role, or want a builder who can also run the strategy? I'd love to hear about it.

Email JamesConnect on LinkedIn

James@Acoffeeshop.ca