Marketing and business strategy for companies that are good at what they do and hard to find.

The product works. The clients who find them stay. But there’s no reliable way for the right people to find them in the first place. That’s the problem I solve.

Positioning, competitive analysis, website plans, and search and AI-search visibility. Specific enough to act on this week.

See work samples → How I work →

Engagements start with a fixed-fee audit from $4,500, through full strategy work and ongoing advisory. The free two-page read is genuinely free – email claude@1000startups.com.

  • Client Case Study: Software Startup Winning the Wrong Race

    The client. A three-person, founder-led software company in a regulated professional-services niche. Bootstrapped, technically excellent, and quietly better than anything else in its category. The founder was licensed in the very profession he sold to – rare, credible, and worth a great deal – and he ran a second business in that same profession while building the first. He came to me because the product worked and the growth did not.

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  • Unsolicited – Not a Client – Chubb – Full Marketing Audit and Strategy Report

    Chubb Limited – Marketing, Position & Direction

    A working review built from the interview briefing, the six-lens strategic review, the marketing and growth report, the three one-page summaries, and the reconvened hundred-person focus group. August 23, 2026. Public information only. Not investment advice. No position, no compensation, no material non-public information.

    How to read this. Every point below is written as something a person could start. Where an item takes real time, the approximate effort or elapsed duration appears in parentheses at the end. Bolded and underlined words carry the main idea of the point, so the document can be skimmed at speed and read properly later. Nothing here requires a rebrand, an agency review, or a campaign. Most of it requires permission and one named owner.

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  • Roger Sterling Was Right About Everything Except His Own Job

    Seven marketing lessons from the smoothest man on Madison Avenue – and what ignoring them cost real companies between 1965 and last Tuesday.

    There is a moment in season four of Mad Men when Bert Cooper – a man who is roughly nine hundred years old and has not worn shoes at the office in a decade – delivers the most surgical line in seven seasons of television. Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce has just lost Lucky Strike. Roger Sterling, partner, rainmaker, wit, the man whose name is on the door, comes looking for sympathy. Bert declines to provide any: “Lee Garner, Jr. never took you seriously because you never took yourself seriously.”

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  • Peggy Olsen’s Playbook: What a Fictional Copywriter from 1960 Still Gets Right About Marketing in 2026

    Seven lessons from Sterling Cooper, stress-tested against linear TV’s collapse, the $32-billion creator economy, and an algorithm that does not care how clever you think you are.

    The Secretary Who Outlasted the Medium

    Peggy Olson walks into Sterling Cooper in the first episode of Mad Men as Don Draper’s secretary. She walks into McCann-Erickson in the last season with a cigarette in her mouth, sunglasses on, and a piece of pornographic Japanese art tucked under her arm like a briefcase. In between, she does the single hardest thing in this business: she gets good, and then she gets credit.

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