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.

  • 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.

    (more…)
    ,

  • 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.

    (more…)
    ,

  • 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.

    (more…)
    ,

  • The Newsletter You Actually Own

    A Q&A on audience ownership, algorithm risk, and why the advice you give every client is the one you never took.

    You tell every client to own their audience. Then you build yours on rented land, from a landlord who can raise the rent tonight, under a lease you never read. I have 28,000 followers on a platform I do not own, cannot export, and cannot reach without permission from a ranking system that changes without telling me. Below is the argument, in the form of the questions people actually ask me, with the receipts attached.

    (more…)
    ,

  • Write the Comparison Page Before Somebody Else Does

    A Q&A about the highest-intent page on your website, the one you almost certainly have not built. Featuring cookies, both kinds.

    Right now a person with a budget and a shortlist is typing your name, the word “vs,” and the name of your rival. That page exists. The only open question is who wrote it, and if the answer is not you, it is an affiliate collecting a commission on the other name.

    (more…)
    ,

  • Where the Model Reads: Forums Are Small Rooms With Permanent Records

    The audience in the thread is forty people. The audience for the transcript is everyone who asks a similar question for the next six years.

    Somewhere right now a person with a real problem is typing it into a chat window, and a machine is building the answer out of things other people wrote in public years ago. Almost none of that raw material comes from your homepage. Here is how to be in the room where the answer gets assembled.

    1. What is the argument, in one breath?

    (more…)
    ,

  • Cite or Do Not Say It

    Sourcing stopped being an academic courtesy the moment machines started deciding which claims to repeat.

    Q1. Why did sourcing become an operational problem instead of a style preference?

    1. The readership changed. A retrieval system crawling your page is not charmed by your prose. It hunts for a claim it can lift out clean and pin to a name.

    2. Growth advisor Kevin Indig analyzed roughly 1.2 million ChatGPT answers and isolated 18,012 verified citations. Per Search Engine Land, February 2026: 44.2% of citations came from the first 30% of a page, 31.1% from the middle, 24.7% from the last third, at a reported p-value of 0.0.

    (more…)
    ,

  • Both Sides of the Desk: Recruiting Firms Own the Best Data in B2B, and Publish None of It

    You know what everybody earns, who is quietly looking, which employers cannot keep anyone, and how long every seat takes to fill. You publish job ads.

    A question and answer guide for staffing and search firm owners sitting on a census and behaving like a classifieds page. Every figure is sourced, and the sources are listed again at the end.

    Q1. What am I actually sitting on that I do not realize is valuable?

    A census of your niche. You just filed it in an applicant tracking system instead of publishing it.

    (more…)
    ,