Product leadership for platforms, marketplaces, and AI-enabled software.
Variant Media is the practice of Mike Simpson — a senior product operator who's spent a decade building marketplace, SaaS, and AI products, with deep growth and analytics fluency informing every decision.
Selected Clients
Product and platform work across marketplaces, AI, and B2B SaaS.
A rotating look at a few of the products and platforms Mike has shipped — across travel, healthcare, fintech, M&A software, and creator-economy tools.
10+
Years leading product
Marketplace, B2B SaaS, AI, healthcare workflows, and fintech platforms
30+
Products and platforms shipped
Across travel, martech, clinical trials, M&A software, creator economy, and financial services
$5M+
Acquisition spend governed
Attribution, channel mix, and measurement experience that informs product decisions
Research: Mike Simpson has co-authored peer-reviewed research on social media and health education with teams at Cedars-Sinai, published in The American Journal of Gastroenterology and Crohn's & Colitis 360.
View publications
Fractional product leadership.
I embed inside product and engineering teams to set strategy, define platform architecture, and ship core systems — search, recommendations, marketplace mechanics, AI workflows. Growth, attribution, and analytics experience inform the roadmap; they aren't a separate practice.
One operator. Full ownership.
Variant Media is a single-operator practice. No account managers, no junior staff, no handoffs. When you engage Variant Media, you work directly with Mike.
Mike brings 10+ years of product management and 20+ years across software, design, and growth. He was Operations Director at The Venue Report — a venture-backed travel platform where he led product, search, content, and analytics — and has since served as fractional product and growth lead across marketplaces, B2B SaaS, AI tools, clinical-trial workflow software, and fintech platforms. Co-author of two peer-reviewed papers on digital health interventions (American Journal of Gastroenterology, Crohn's & Colitis 360).
Meet Mike Simpson
How I engage
Three ways to work together — product-led, with growth and analytics built in.
Fractional Product Lead
Monthly retainer. I embed with product, engineering, and leadership to own strategy, roadmap, platform architecture, and the cross-functional shipping cadence — marketplace mechanics, search, recommendations, and AI workflows included.
Product + Growth Systems
Fixed-scope project. I build the connection between your product surface and your acquisition engine — search, onboarding, instrumentation, attribution, lifecycle — so the funnel runs as one system, not as disconnected campaigns.
0→1 Platform Builds
Project or retainer. I take a workflow problem from concept to working software — technical product strategy, scoping, vendor decisions, AI integration, and the engineering collaboration to ship it.
Selected Work
Recent Case Studies.
Design Industry Publishing
DesignGuide
A Complete Overhaul of a 20-Year-Old Site — Built for the Next 20.
Site Age
20+ Years
Advisory Services
Candor Advisors
Turning 30 Years of Expertise Into an AI Tool Founders Can Use at 2am.
Source Material
30 Years
Private Golf Club Directory
Go Private Golf
From Zero to 10,000 Monthly Visitors — Without Paid Ads.
Organic Monthly Visits
10,000+
Companies and products I've worked with
A decade of marketplaces, platforms, AI tools, and operational software — across travel, healthcare, fintech, and B2B SaaS.
Notes from the work
Occasional writing on product strategy, marketplace mechanics, AI product development, and the systems behind growth.
No agency pitches. Just the work.