PJ Yancey

Growth Engineer at Bubble

Smiling on a driftwood-covered beach, with a hand-drawn cartoon figure peeking out from behind a driftwood shelter

About me

I live in Chelsea, NYC, and work as a growth engineer at Bubble in the Flatiron.

A few passion projects outside of work:

$1M+ GMVMinute Land, an experimental marketplace for micro-sized land plots, featured in Insider and NY Post
25K+ users in 2 monthsStomped, an iPhone app that hides your map under fog and unlocks it as you explore
AcquiredAcrefly, a marketplace connecting drone pilots and commercial realtors
10+ clientsIdea1K, a web development agency (a time before you could just ask Claude)
3k subsRidiculous Marketplaces, an AI/tech oriented YouTube channel acting as an inbound pipeline and blog of sorts

Distribution is hard, but solvable

Before I plan any new product, the first and most important question I ask myself: how am I going to make an engaging TikTok about this?

I built a scraper here that finds videos I made about my work. Includes where it has been reposted.

Reverse.dev

Reverse is an experimental product from Bubble. It turns a codebase into a visual map anyone on a team can navigate, so people building with AI tools can see what their app actually does.

Thanks to these videos, in one week, we more than doubled the userbase!

Scribbles from my first storyboarding session below.

A whiteboard with a hand-drawn map of the US, surrounded by planning notes for the video: a list of hooks, storyboard steps and the chess-cheating idea

Stomped is an iOS app that shows you everywhere you've ever been. You unlock 'tiles' as you walk, run, bike through your city or beyond. There's a leaderboard component too to see who's on top of NYC/Paris/Menlo Park etc.

Stomped was really fun to market. I found the formula early on. I'd basically go walk 10 miles on foot, screen recording with the app open, speed that up 70X, and splice in a few clips of my surroundings as I went on.

The best performing caption was "Day X of unlocking every tile in NYC". No written CTA, just a little fomo. It only took a week or two to hit 1K users and then another 2 months to hit 20K.

Me on a subway platform wearing a TV on my back that shows a live Stomped leaderboard — A little bit of guerrilla marketing with a backpack-mounted TV and 40lb battery, along with a custom app build

A group of people walking down a New York street together — Stompathon: a group walk one weeknight for Stomped fans in NYC

Stomped map of Manhattan with 13,780 tiles unlocked — My personal Stomped stats as of Oct 2026

Stomped poster reading "walk to unlock every block", with a QR code and the app open on a phone — Sidewalk poster featuring 'Stompy'

Minute Land

Minute Land is a tiny land plot marketplace. You can find a 1,000 square foot plot (32x32') for $100 in the middle of Oregon or the SoCal desert. You get the exact coordinate points of the corners and can relist your plot on the site. In 2023-24, it had thousands of paying customers.

I lived off-grid for weeks in the desert, built a small shack, was interrogated by tweakers with guns, and shot some incredible content that accelerated the company from under my feet. I found my way through regulatory, financing, and legal projects and learned a hell of a lot about running a business people care about. I got lucky with an Insider article and mini documentary with a really cool filmmaker!

A wooden floor frame on posts in sagebrush desert, with a camp chair in front of it — The skeleton of my off-grid shack - over 100 degrees in the sun

Lumber loaded through the open boot of a dusty car in a hardware store car park — Mid-build: trip into town to grab some more planks

A pickup truck and a person on a dirt track in open desert, with mountains under heavy cloud behind — First visit to an acquired property in Amargosa Valley, Nevada

A half-built shack with a plywood floor, one wall and a roof, open to sagebrush hills, with a camp chair and bags inside — Making progress - first time swinging a hammer

A laptop on a rough wooden bench inside the unfinished shack, with a sleeping bag hung over a beam — Taking a break from building the shack to develop the site on my hotspot

Me from behind in a Minute Land Co. t-shirt, hand on my head, looking at a pickup truck stuck in a muddy ditch beside snow — Embarrassing and dangerous, drove into an icy stream in a ditch and got stranded remotely there for over 24h. Had to sleep in the truck and never saw a soul until I got rescued

Shooting a goofy TikTok, Barstool sports reposted this one

Acrefly

I was having a bunch of fun with a DJI Mini Pro 3 drone while working on Minute. While playing with the drone's image metadata, I made a tool to better manage these assets, grouping shoot sessions by geofencing, and enabled monetization to make selling drone assets to realtors easier.

It turned into a gig marketplace and I upsold drone pilots on a premium plan to further accelerate their outbound pipelines. It had about 5K users and 80 subscribers when I sold it in August 2024 to travel.

A hand holding a small drone above a dirt road winding through hills under a bright sun

Building a custom drip outbound system using Acrefly

Custom property lines tool that looks up and overlays parcel boundaries using drone GPS and gimbal data

Let's connect

Feel free to reach me at pj@pjyancey.com or connect with me on LinkedIn.