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.

  • Ghosting Runs in Both Directions: Where Hiring Goes Silent, What It Costs You, and How to Stop It

    In November 1520, somewhere in the maze of channels at the bottom of South America, one of Ferdinand Magellan’s ships simply turned around. The San Antonio, loaded with a big share of the fleet’s food, slipped off and sailed home to Spain. No note. Magellan’s crews spent days searching the channels for it.

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  • Brand Spend for a Firm That Cannot Afford Brand Spend

    What the big-budget effectiveness research means when your entire marketing budget fits in five figures.

    In Season 2 of Mad Men, Sterling Cooper dumps Mohawk Airlines, a small regional carrier that paid on time, because Duck Phillips swears American Airlines is ready to sign. Don objects. He loses. American never signs, and Mohawk is gone for good. Small firms pull a version of this move every quarter. They read about Nike, conclude that brand building is a toy for giants, and pour every last dollar into chasing leads. Then they wonder why each new quarter starts from zero. Here is what the research actually says for a firm your size, and what to do on Monday.

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  • Niche Audio Is Underpriced (and the People Selling It Haven’t Noticed Yet)

    Somewhere right now, a podcast about industrial refrigeration compliance is selling a 60-second host-read ad for about $300. Its 900 listeners include plant managers who sign seven-figure purchase orders. Two miles away, a software company is paying LinkedIn $62.67 per thousand impressions (the U.S. average in ZenABM’s 2026 benchmark of 161,256 ads) to flash its logo at people mid-scroll. One of these is a bargain. You can probably guess which. Below is the proof, the math, and the playbook.

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  • Put a Human Name on the Page

    Why anonymous content loses on every axis a retrieval system measures, and what a real byline is actually worth in AI search

    Somewhere in your CMS there is an article credited to “Editorial Team.” It has a header image of a woman in a blazer gesturing at a whiteboard. She does not exist. She is a stock photo with a job title, and she is the weakest link between your best thinking and the machines deciding whether anyone reads it.

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  • Marketing for Companies That Make Physical Things

    A question-and-answer field guide for manufacturers, fabricators and industrial suppliers, with a detour through the 19th century

    Almost everything published about marketing this year was written about software. That is a problem when your product weighs four tons, ships on a flatbed, and gets specified fourteen months before anybody cuts a purchase order. The buyer is an engineer who reads datasheets for a living and has a professional allergy to adjectives. Below are the questions industrial companies actually ask, answered with numbers, named sources, and a few dead industrialists who solved this before electricity was common.

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  • Pick the Vertical With Data, Not With a Hunch

    Sizing a staffing niche with labor statistics, posting volume, fee norms and competitor density, plus the signals that should send you somewhere else entirely.

    Part One: Why Your Gut Makes a Lousy Market Analyst

    1. Why does almost every new staffing firm pick its niche the same way?

    Because the hunch is free, fast and flattering. Your old industry hands you a vocabulary, a contact list, and the warm feeling that you already know something. That is real. The problem is that your resume answers exactly one question, whether you can hold a conversation with a hiring manager in that space, and leaves six others untouched. Jason Cohen, who bootstrapped Smart Bear and then built WP Engine, described the death spiral on A Smart Bear: a founder gets a flash of insight, talks to three people who confirm the problem is real, builds a solution that works, and shuts the doors in 6 to 24 months wondering what happened. The req is real. The hiring manager nods. The desk still starves.

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  • Attention Management When You Are the Product

    A Q&A for founders who are also the delivery team, the sales team, and the logo

    There is a particular flavor of tired that only arrives when you are the entire company. You end a client call at 2:15 and you were the deliverable. At 2:30 you are the sales department. At 4:00 a prospect asks what you charge and now you are the brand. Most productivity advice quietly assumes somebody upstream is absorbing the chaos for you. When you are the product, the chaos lands on your desk at full strength, wearing a different job title every ninety minutes. Every number below is attributed in the body and linked at the end, because you should be able to check the work.

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  • Ungate Everything: The Form In Front Of Your PDF Is Now A Wall

    A question-and-answer field guide to deleting your lead capture forms, with receipts from the people who actually count the clicks. Every figure below comes from an independent researcher or a small publisher running original studies.

    Q1. Why is everybody suddenly telling me to tear out my lead generation forms?

    Because the gate was a fair trade when a human was the only possible reader, and a human is no longer the only possible reader.

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