Hi, I'm Zachary Hurdle
I am an entrepreneur with over a decade of experience improving processes and uplifting teams through using my skills in web development, automation, food and beverage consulting, event management and more. I leverage my technical expertise to develop bespoke web applications and infrastructure for myself and others.
Coupon Modal
Maximizing Latent Partnerships
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Problem: A number of partnerships had been created, but there were untapped opportunities which could give Fast Train Media's partners more air time on their site with 500k to 1 million monthly visitors. Readers had incentive to visit the website for travel content, but little incentive to engage with Fast Train's partners unless they had a trip coming up. For a travel site with such a substantial readership, they had yet to make the most of engaging their audience beyond page visits.
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Task: Create a coupon modal showcases partners' coupon codes and works cohesively within the websites current framework.
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Timeframe: 3 months.
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My Role: Web developer, working with the their development team and management to define scope and to bring to life their vision.
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Key User Journeys:
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Backend Simplicity: Management of the coupons comes down to non-technical users. Coupon creation and management needed to be as easy as creating a new 'Post' on WordPress.
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Uninterruped Engagement: Ensuring that website visitors had an easy time understanding what to click if they were interested in a coupon or returning to the main website.
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Fluid Advancement: Once a website visitor has decided on a coupon they're interested in, they need to be directed to where they expect to go.
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Community Hackathon
Coding Curriculum with a Community Focus
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Problem: Currently, there is a profusion of AI and LLM-based tools. However, they routinely entrench existing biases and their application is fraught with ethical issues. So, my goal with the Community Hackathon was to nurture a cohort of non-traditional, diverse web developers who would be poised to take on challenges in the community – with deep lived experience and empathy. With their newly learned skills and confidence, I believed they would be able to use powerful digital tools for good.
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Timeframe: 6 months.
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My Role: Curriculum creator. Instructor. Over the course of six weeks I taught a group of high school seniors from disadvantaged communities in the Twin Cities how to create and manage their own digital infrastructure. We covered a variety of topics, including web hosting and setting up a personal website on WordPress. After learning foundational skills, we applied our collective knowledge and expertise to a real-life community problem: creating a well-designed and easy-to-use system for delivering free snow shoveling services to the community’s elderly and disabled population.
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Outcomes: The high schoolers I mentored for the summer learned how to be their own web admin. They learned how to work with WordPress and become comfortable with navigating the interface, and ultimately, they learned how to speak about the experience of working with digital tools - a crucial skillset in our current environment.
Community Hackathon
Coding Curriculum with a Community Focus
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Problem: Currently, there is a profusion of AI and LLM-based tools. However, they routinely entrench existing biases and their application is fraught with ethical issues. So, my goal with the Community Hackathon was to nurture a cohort of non-traditional, diverse web developers who would be poised to take on challenges in the community – with deep lived experience and empathy. With their newly learned skills and confidence, I believed they would be able to use powerful digital tools for good.
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Timeframe: 6 months.
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My Role: Curriculum creator. Instructor. Over the course of six weeks I taught a group of high school seniors from disadvantaged communities in the Twin Cities how to create and manage their own digital infrastructure. We covered a variety of topics, including web hosting and setting up a personal website on WordPress. After learning foundational skills, we applied our collective knowledge and expertise to a real-life community problem: creating a well-designed and easy-to-use system for delivering free snow shoveling services to the community’s elderly and disabled population.
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Outcomes: The high schoolers I mentored for the summer learned how to be their own web admin. They learned how to work with WordPress and become comfortable with navigating the interface, and ultimately, they learned how to speak about the experience of working with digital tools - a crucial skillset in our current environment.
Rental Health Check
Giving Renters a Leg Up
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Problem: There are many resources available to renters, but those resources are often underutilized because of a lack of awareness.
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Timeframe: 3 months.
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Task: We paired these resources with public metrics on classifications for disadvantaged and vulnerable populations, and a 5 minute survey. Once completed, the renter would receive a customized report detailing the top 5 resources we believe they should access based on their described situation.
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My Role: Lead Product Manager. Web developer. I threaded together our resources database, analytics, and collected user responses with an automated delivery mechanism that sent renters a bespoke PDF detailing the resoureces we recommend they should access.
Zachary Hurdle | Community Connector
ABOUT:
I'm a Twin Cities-based community connector with a passion for building community-centered experiences. Over the past decade, I've led impactful initiatives across food and beverage, housing, and community engagement - delivering impactful products and experiences for international media companies like Fast Train Media, and in partnership with iconic institutions like Best Buy's Teen Tech Centers.
My core strengths include personalization, experimentation, and strategy development. I thrive in fast-paced, cross-functional environments and I'm energized by solving complex user and business problems.
Whether launching a new startup, streamlining partnership engagement, or automating core processes, I bring an entrepreneurial mindset, holistic rigor, and community obsession to every product I touch.
When not working, I'm mainly cooking, obsessing over my Obsidian worklow, or out exploring 🔭
