Jesse Saldana
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About me
👋🏽 Hi there, I'm Jesse Saldana and this is my tiny corner of the internet — all text written by human me. You can learn more about me professionally and the "nothings" that interest me professionally, personally, and creatively on my blog.
As a more formal introduction, I'm based in Ithaca, NY where, much to my amazement, I've lived for 10+ years with my wife, two cats, and two dogs. I only say amazement because I moved here sight unseen as an early twenty-something.
My non-working hours are spent with my wife and pets, running, enjoying music, reading, and tackling various projects around the house. Professionally, I've been in the nonprofit/Tech for Good space my entire career and have been moved by the organizations I've been able to work with in that time.
Since 2018, I've led and helped scale Product, Engineering, and Product Design teams at two startups, GiveGab and Givebutter, where I've built high performing teams that have put out well-loved products.
Additionally, I've spent a fair amount of time volunteering on two local nonprofit boards: The Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, where I served on the board from 2020-2024, and Buffalo Street Books Cooperative (BSB), where I've served on the board from 2020-Present.
I'm particularly proud of my time with BSB, where I've been Treasurer for the past few years and have been part of a board that has navigated the increasingly unsustainable retail environment for local bookstores. This past fall, we successfully began our transformation to re-envision what a local bookstore is by transitioning to a nonprofit that looks to membership and grant funding to help carry out its programming mission.
What I've been up to
Givebutter is a SaaS platform focused on serving nonprofits and their donors by being the home for an organization's fundraising, donor management, and automated marketing motions.
When I joined Givebutter in 2022, I was the sole Product Manager. I oversaw and scaled the Product Management and Product Design teams from myself and another Product Designer to a team of four Product Managers and three Product Designers. In addition to this, I worked closely with the Engineering and Data teams to help scale those functions.
I worked closely with the CTO to help build a culture of product excellence and collaboration that focused on delivering valuable features to customers consistently. In 2024, we launched 180 features that had 15,472 votes from customers!
I led the team to launch four new revenue channels: auctions, a mobile app, automated physical mailings, and a paid CRM—our first paid subscription product. During my tenure, this resulted in a 3.8x growth in annual transaction volume, a 3.7x growth in revenue, and a 3x growth in customers.
Additionally, I architected and implemented the company's data stack, including our ETL and reporting tooling and built out our v1 of transforms and reports for internal stakeholders before transitioning that to a dedicated data team. I also worked closely with marketing on Product Marketing and customer growth initiatives to improve customer awareness, education, and adoption of new and existing features.
As of Winter '25, Givebutter is ranked as the #1 software for fundraising, donor management, nonprofit CRM, and auctions on G2!
Led the strategic planning and roadmapping for three product lines focused on Giving Days, Peer-to-Peer Fundraising and events, and nonprofit discovery product. Products generated $100M+ in transaction volume and had NPS scores above 70.
Managed the Product, Engineering, and QA team of 11 individuals.
Led the company's transition to a DevOps model, which increased the velocity of the engineering team by 3x.
In April of 2021, GiveGab had a successful exit and was acquired by EveryAction. In the fall of 2021, EveryAction was part of a merge with Social Solutions and Cybergrants and is now Bonterra.
Drove 40% year-over-year growth in customer transaction volume through product improvements and platform optimization.