Author · Founder, Orbit
Justin Williames
10+ years at the intersection of product, growth, and lifecycle marketing. Based on the Sunshine Coast, Queensland. Founder of Orbit. Author of every guide in the Orbit library.
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5K+ followers · short-form writing on lifecycle, CRM, and AI-first marketing.
The short version
Justin grew up in a small country town in Australia, moved up to Queensland to study marketing at the University of the Sunshine Coast, then headed to Melbourne to start his marketing and lifecycle career properly.
From Melbourne he moved to London for a few years, working in fast-paced growth and tech: Deliveroo during its early growth phase, Trainline, then Depop (pre-Etsy acquisition). That's where most of the decade of lifecycle experience that shows up in the Orbit guides actually happened.
He came back to Melbourne to join Linktree as Head of CRM, building the CRM function for a 50M-user consumer product. Then relocated to the Sunshine Coast, where he now lives in Currimundi with his wife, two kids, and a groodle, working remotely for scale-up and start-up businesses.
Orbit is the extension of that arc: a way to codify the lifecycle methodologies he's watched work across a decade of consumer-scale programs, and hand them to the next operator who needs them.
Career
CRM & AI Workflows · Sophiie AI
Current: building AI workflow systems for trades SMBs.
Feb 2026 – present
Sunshine Coast, QLD
Fractional Head of CRM · Whering
Consumer fashion resale app.
2025
Remote
Fractional Head of Growth · The Grants Hub
Australian grants advisory.
2024–2025
Remote
Head of CRM · Linktree
Built the CRM function for a 50M+ user consumer product.
2022–2024
Melbourne, VIC
CRM Manager · Depop
Fashion marketplace, pre-Etsy acquisition.
2020–2022
London, UK
CRM / Marketing · Trainline
UK rail ticketing at scale.
2018–2020
London, UK
CRM / Marketing · Deliveroo
Lifecycle marketing during Deliveroo's early growth phase.
2016–2018
London, UK
First 100 Days Team · Telstra
Worked on lifecycle programs for new enterprise customers.
2014–2016
Sunshine Coast, QLD
Certifications
- Braze Marketer Certification (Feb 2021)
- Dynamic Personalization with Liquid, Braze (Jun 2019)
Education
Bachelor of Business (Marketing) with IT minor, University of the Sunshine Coast (2011–2014)
Recent guides
All 99 guidesHow much does lifecycle marketing cost? The honest breakdown
Almost nobody answers this plainly, so here it is: the four buckets your money actually lands in, how ESP pricing scales as your list grows, what in-house, agency and fractional really trade against each other, and the integration bill that never appears on a quote.
What is MCP? The Model Context Protocol, explained for marketers
MCP is the standard that lets an AI assistant stop describing your ESP and start reading it. What a tool is, what a skill is, what stays on your machine and what doesn't, and the questions to ask any vendor before you hand over a production API key.
Connect Claude to Braze: the read-only-first setup
Connecting Claude to Braze is two strings and a list of checkboxes: a REST API key, your cluster endpoint, and the permissions you tick when you create the key. Those checkboxes are the whole security model. Here is which ones to grant first, which to withhold, and how to verify what the integration can actually see.
UTM parameters for email: the convention that still parses a year later
Five parameters, one delimiter, everything lowercase, and a builder open next to the ESP. Most UTM trouble is a naming problem in disguise, and it only surfaces when someone tries to read last year's report.
Email popup timing: fire on a signal, not on a stopwatch
Most lead-capture modals fire on a blind timer a few seconds after page load. That timer selects for the visitor who is still there and still busy, the most engaged person on the site, and interrupts them. Here's the intent-aware version, including the accessibility duties nobody reads before setting aria-modal.
First-party email analytics: the minimum schema, and the discipline that keeps it honest
You can measure a site and the traffic your sends drive into it with three Postgres tables and no third-party pixel. What nobody warns you about is that first-party analytics fails silently: no vendor is going to tell you the column is empty. Two bugs from our own tables, and the rules we now work to.
Elsewhere
What I'm building
Orbit: everything above, packaged for Claude.
A Claude Desktop extension that turns a decade of lifecycle work into 88 executable skills and 136 MCP tools, with native Braze integration. Every skill and tool is included.