Aaron Horne | Portfolio

Technology leader, eight-time SaaS founder, and sales-engineering executive in Austin, Texas.

I have spent more than two decades turning complex technical systems into commercial outcomes: leading global solution-engineering teams, building eight SaaS companies of my own, and shipping production code at every level of the stack. I sell with the credibility of an engineer and build with the discipline of an operator.

Stats

• 20+ Years in technology: Engineering, sales engineering, and founding, across the full stack and the full deal cycle.
• 8 SaaS companies founded: TabPref, Eirena, Klyvaris, MyMarketer, HomeSchoolEd, Mindful Progress, Coupon Swipe, and DemoGuards: multi-tenant products spanning hospitality, family care, security, marketing automation, education, mental wellness, local commerce, and demo-time data protection.
• 16 Shipped products: Live web, mobile, browser-extension, and desktop products spanning hospitality, healthcare, security, fitness, education, marketing, mental wellness, local commerce, analytics, sales operations, demo-time privacy, gaming, and animated narrative explainers.
• 9 iOS · Android · macOS · Chrome: Platform-native builds shipped or in store review across the Apple App Store, Google Play, packaged macOS distributions, and the Chrome Web Store: TabPref, Freeze Baseball, PaddleVibe, StreetRunner, Yapdesk, Mindful Progress, Coupon Swipe, Jungle Quest, and DemoGuards.

About

Based in Austin, Texas.

Experience

Founder & CEO at TabPref (2025–Present)

• Founded and shipped TabPref, a professional networking platform for the hospitality service industry serving establishments, service professionals, consumers, and vendors.
• Architected a TypeScript / React / Node.js / PostgreSQL platform with native iOS and Android apps and a Progressive Web App; exited public beta in April 2026.
• Built 30+ POS integrations (Toast, Square, Clover, Lightspeed, SpotOn, Stripe Terminal) and a custom Zapier app connecting TabPref to 7,000+ tools.

Founder at Eirena: Family Care Vault (2025–Present)

• Designed and shipped a HIPAA-mindful family-care coordination platform for medications, doctors, emergency packets, and daily care digests.
• Implemented dual-store subscription billing across web (Stripe) and iOS (RevenueCat / StoreKit) with a single source of truth for vault entitlements.
• Built an offline-capable emergency view with text-to-speech for first responders, engineered for real edge cases rather than demos.

Director, Global Solution Engineering at Enterprise SaaS (2018–2024)

• Led globally distributed solution-engineering and sales-engineering organizations supporting nine-figure ARR books of business.
• Partnered with sales leadership to design technical wins for Fortune 500 accounts, owning POCs, RFPs, executive briefings, and architecture review boards.
• Coached managers and ICs into senior leadership roles; built hiring rubrics, enablement curricula, and the technical-evaluation playbooks the team still runs.

Director / Senior Manager, Sales Engineering at SaaS & Cloud Platforms (2010–2018)

• Built and scaled high-performance pre-sales teams from the ground up across multiple high-growth SaaS companies.
• Closed strategic enterprise deals by translating engineering depth into business outcomes during executive-level technical discovery.
• Designed reference architectures, demo environments, and competitive-displacement playbooks adopted org-wide.

Sales & Sales Engineer at Earlier in Career (2003–2010)

• Carried quota as a sales rep and partnered with engineering as a sales engineer. That dual-track foundation still grounds every deal cycle and architecture conversation I have today.
• Owned customer-facing technical discovery, demos, and integrations for enterprise customers across web, mobile, and integration tiers.

Core Competencies

• Sales Engineering Leadership
• SaaS Product Development
• Enterprise Solution Architecture
• Founding & Operating
• AI Agent Engineering
• Rapid Prototyping
• Third-Party API Integration
• Mobile & Game Development
• Subscription & Billing Systems
• CRM & Sales Operations
• Privacy & Data Protection Engineering
• Data Visualization & Insights
• Analytics & Event Pipelines
• Hackathon Delivery
• Go-to-Market Strategy
• Cross-Functional Team Building
• Technical Discovery & POCs
• Executive Storytelling

Technical Stack

• TypeScript
• React & React Native
• Node.js & Express
• PostgreSQL & Drizzle ORM
• Expo / EAS
• Tauri & Rust
• Vite
• Tailwind CSS
• Three.js & React Three Fiber
• Framer Motion
• shadcn/ui & Radix
• Recharts
• PWA / Service Workers
• Chrome Extensions (MV3)
• Anthropic Claude & OpenAI
• Stripe & RevenueCat
• Clerk Auth
• Replit Auth (OIDC)
• Cloudflare Workers
• WebSockets & real-time systems
• Geolocation & Device Sensors
• MaxMind GeoIP
• Twilio & SendGrid
• Gmail API
• Cloudinary
• ElevenLabs (AI voice)
• Resend
• Yelp Fusion & Flipp APIs
• RxNav (FDA medication data)
• Notion API
• Speech & Voice Input
• OpenAPI / contract-first APIs

Education

Bachelor of Arts, Economics, The University of Texas

Selected Projects

• TabPref: An end-to-end hospitality workforce platform with scheduling, payroll, TabChat, events, and marketing, wrapped around a public professional network where the bartenders, chefs, servers, and sommeliers you love are actually findable when they move venues.
• DemoGuards: Protect every demo. A Chrome MV3 extension plus multi-tenant web dashboard that automatically blurs emails, phone numbers, API keys, JWTs, SSNs, credit cards, and customer names on any web page, so sales engineers and founders can screen-share live customer environments without leaking PII.
• Freeze Baseball: A mobile coaching app for teaching 10U–12U baseball defensive positioning through interactive drills. Everyone moves on every play.
• Klyvaris: A cybersecurity education SaaS with 60+ hands-on security tools, live CVE feeds from the NVD, and three focused AI tutors that turn real-world threat intel into a teaching surface.
• Mindful Progress: The quiet space between you and your therapy: daily check-ins, a private journal, and goals you actually keep, designed with therapist input as the gentle structure between sessions.
• Eirena: A family care vault for coordinating medications, doctors, emergency packets, and daily care digests, engineered for real edge cases rather than demos.
• Yapdesk: Free, local, push-to-talk dictation for macOS. Hold a hotkey, speak, release, and your audio never leaves your Mac.
• TabPref CRM: A slim hospitality-workforce CRM for tracking the bars, restaurants, spas, casinos, hotels, and lodging properties we partner with, plus the people who run them, with AI-drafted outreach, campaigns, reminders, and revenue tracking in a single workspace.
• Data Sights: A privacy-friendly, single-user web analytics app in the spirit of Plausible: one tiny script tag, no cookies, no PII, and a clean dashboard for visitors, top pages, referrers, locations, and device breakdowns across every site I own.
• HomeSchoolEd: A mobile-first, installable PWA for homeschool families: flexible weekly scheduling, progress tracking, transcripts, and college-readiness in one place. Built in 2 hours at the Miro + Replit SXSW 2026 Hackathon with Marisa Perryman.
• Coupon Swipe: A Tinder-style coupon discovery app for the deals near you: swipe right on the verified offers from local restaurants, grocers, beauty, tech, fitness, and shopping spots that are worth your time, swipe left on the ones that aren't.
• MyMarketer: An autonomous AI marketing agent platform: content creation, competitor tracking, inbox management, and analytics from one dashboard that learns from your feedback.
• High Bandwidth Thinking: An animated, presentation-ready explainer that reframes ADD as a career strength called "High Bandwidth Thinking." Ships as two coordinated artifacts in one pnpm monorepo: an interactive scroll-driven web story and a fully-rendered narrated short with ElevenLabs voiceover.
• Jungle Quest: A low-poly 3D jungle adventure built for the browser: hunt for the Golden Idol, chop through vines, swing on whips, and dodge snakes and jaguars on desktop or mobile. Built at the Replit 10th Birthday Buildathon.
• PaddleVibe Arcade: A nostalgic brick breaker reimagined for one-handed iPhone play, with 300 procedurally generated levels and a dedicated thumb zone so your finger never blocks the action.
• StreetRunner: Outside: A location-enabled outdoor action game that turns a real-world run into a 5-lane obstacle course, powered by GPS, accelerometer, and device tilt to get kids moving outside.