Founder, Pruvara · Ph.D., Economics
Hi, I'm Preston Monk.
I'm an economist and the founder of Pruvara. We build and run the online presence of growing businesses — the website, the search visibility, the measurement — and improve it from evidence, continuously. This page is who's behind that work.
- 01 Build
- 02 Measure
- 03 Improve
Why I built it.
Most growing businesses are flying blind online. They have a website; they don't know what it's doing — where visitors come from, what brought them in, which of them tapped to call. Guesswork fills the gap, and guesswork is expensive.
Pruvara is the alternative I wanted to exist: a first-class website built around one outcome — more customers — with measurement wired in from day one. Every visit, call tap, and form send is recorded as it happens by a first-party measurement system I built myself, and the work goes where the evidence points. It's the operating discipline of an enterprise intelligence team, run for businesses that wouldn't otherwise have one.
That alternative is running today: client work is live, the measurement runs continuously on the sites Pruvara operates, and what Pruvara does, what it costs, and the work itself are all public.
How I work.
Evidence before opinion
My training is in economics — a discipline about decisions under uncertainty: what causes what, what a measurement really captures, how much weight a result can bear. Economists are taught to treat a claim nobody can verify as no claim at all. I hold my own work to that standard.
Measurement first
I don't bolt analytics onto finished work — I build the instrument before the thing it measures. Pruvara runs on a first-party event pipeline I built for exactly this: every visit and action recorded as it happens, attributable to the source that produced it, with visitor identity protected by design.
Improve from what's true
A site is never finished; it's operated. Changes are chosen from what the evidence says is the biggest opportunity, shipped, and then measured like everything else. When the data says I was wrong, the data wins — that's the entire point of collecting it.
Thinking out loud.
On building in a time when building is cheap — and what's still scarce when it is.
How I got here.
I started in business school. My B.S.B.A. carried a concentration in economics and finance, but it was a business degree first — accounting, management, marketing, operations. I learned how a company keeps its books and how it goes out and finds customers before I learned to model any of it. Most people who go on to a doctorate never take those courses. They're the reason the rest of this is useful to anybody.
Then I went deep. I finished my Ph.D. in Economics at Florida State in 2024, based at the DeVoe L. Moore Center. My dissertation linked millions of property transactions to demographic, environmental, and public administrative records to measure how a shock to a neighborhood — a school, a crime pattern, a new road — moves property values and pushes households to relocate. Assembling records that were never designed to be joined took years, and every decision in that assembly had to survive a committee whose job was to find the flaw in it.
That work teaches you where to put your doubt. An answer can look clean and be built on a join that was quietly wrong — and it will still look clean. A number is only as good as the way it was assembled, which is why I would rather show a business owner how a result was built than ask them to take it on faith.
I took that discipline into enterprise work first, building product intelligence for a national distributor — thousands of products, five years of transaction history, and a sales force that needed answers it could act on. Pruvara runs the same method at the scale of a growing business.
The two trainings answer different questions. Business school taught me what an owner is actually deciding on a Tuesday morning. Economics taught me how to tell whether the thing I changed caused the difference, or whether it was just a good month. Plenty of people can do the second. Doing it in the language of the first is the rarer half, and it's the whole idea behind Pruvara.
I live in Miami, where I'm living the American Dream with my wife Malaya and our son Rainer.
- Ph.D. Economics — 2024
- Florida State University
- M.S. Economics — 2019
- Florida State University
- B.S.B.A. Economics & Finance — 2018
- University of South Alabama