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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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Sponsor the Research, Not the Jersey
A Q&A on why a commissioned study outlives an eight-million-dollar commercial, and how to buy one that people actually quote.
The same money buys a logo on an outfield wall for one season, or an original study that gets cited for a decade. Only one of them survives the invoice. Here is the case, with the receipts.
Q1. What does renting a crowd actually cost in 2026?
1. A thirty-second national spot in Super Bowl LX averaged $8 million, a record. Mark Marshall, NBCUniversal’s chair of global advertising, confirmed a handful of brands paid more than $10 million, and NBCU sold out its entire inventory in September, months before anyone knew the Seahawks and Patriots would be playing. At $8 million, you are paying about $267,000 per second of airtime before you hire a director, an agency, or a celebrity.
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Buy the Words Your Buyer Types
Why Exact-Match Category Domains Still Clear at Eight Figures in the Age of AI Search
A questions-and-answers briefing, with the receipts, the counterarguments, and a short course in naming taught by the War of 1812.
1. Everybody says domain names stopped mattering around 2013. Did they?
Then somebody forgot to tell the buyers. In April 2025, AI.com changed hands for $70 million, paid entirely in cryptocurrency, to Kris Marszalek of Crypto.com. The Financial Times only broke the story in February 2026. It is the largest publicly confirmed all-cash domain sale in history, and it closed last year. Voice.com went from MicroStrategy to Block.one for $30 million, Icon.com sold for $12 million in April 2025, and CarInsurance.com reportedly fetched $49.7 million. Irrelevant assets do not clear at eight figures, twice a year, for twenty-five years.
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Your Broker Asks the Chatbot Too
Insurtechs spend the entire budget on the policyholder and almost nothing on the person who actually decides what gets sold.
1. Who actually decides which carrier writes a commercial risk?
A. The independent agent does, and the business owner mostly ratifies it. In 2025, independent agencies placed 87.7% of all US commercial lines written premium, essentially flat against 87.9% the year before. Across all property and casualty, the channel placed 62% of a market that reached $1.1 trillion in direct written premium. Those are AM Best numbers via the Big “I”. Personal lines is the outlier at 39.5%, and personal lines is where nearly all the consumer-facing marketing energy has gone.
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