Andrew Childs, Founder of MarcoStrat.
I moved to Seattle in 2008 to get a PhD in Human Geography at the University of Washington. The plan was to become a college professor. I finished the degree, and realized what I actually wanted was to stay in Seattle and see what I could do in the business world instead.
15 to 20 minute intro call.
The path from academia to marketing wasn’t a straight line, but the skill underneath it was the same one: writing and teaching people how to think clearly about an idea. I started at Microsoft writing executive presentations and enterprise sales proposals, work that touched $12 million in closed revenue and put me in the top 5 of a 30-person team. From there I moved to Expedia as a copywriter and content marketing manager, where a genuinely excellent manager taught me the real fundamentals of copywriting and content marketing: how to be obsessive about word choice, positioning, and everything that goes into a message that actually lands.
After Expedia, I spent time freelancing and working with agencies, delivering messaging and sales enablement work for Microsoft partner agencies and managing up to two dozen projects at once. That stretch taught me how to build something on my own, and what small businesses genuinely need from a marketing partner versus what they get sold.
I joined Amazon in 2019 and spent four years in increasingly senior roles. I started as editorial lead and copywriter for Amazon Business, building the messaging frameworks and content systems that helped scale the division to $25 billion. From there I became content marketing manager and sales enablement lead for Buy with Prime, which was still an unlaunched, stealth business when I joined. I built the centralized messaging, content, and review process that aligned AWS, Prime, and North America Retail teams around a single launch, and Amazon recognized that work with an “Above and Beyond Marketer of the Year” award in 2021.
From there I moved into a senior product marketing manager role leading go-to-market for the Amazon Dash Cart, a smart shopping cart Amazon was rolling out into Whole Foods and pitching to grocery retailers nationally. I secured the first million-dollar enterprise pilot, managed a million-dollar campaign budget, and built the 60-page field marketing guide that translated consumer research into a real retailer adoption strategy.
I left Amazon for an AI startup, and it was during that stretch, and in the months before it, that I realized what I actually wanted to build. I grew up around small business. My family ran them, and I watched what that kind of work does for the people running it: the specific kind of satisfaction that comes from building something yourself and working directly with the people whose business it actually is. I wanted that for myself.
So I left the AI startup, put my savings into MarcoStrat, and have been running it full time for a little over a year. Every business I’ve helped scale, from Amazon Business to Buy with Prime to Dash Cart, taught me some part of what it takes to make a message land and a launch actually work. MarcoStrat is where all of that goes now, just aimed at businesses much closer to the ones I grew up around.
I serve as a board member and secretary for the Learning Communities Foundation, advising on governance, strategy, and executive communications, and helping align the board and community around funding priorities that expand student access.
15 to 20 minute intro call.
