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.

  • Joan Harris Ran the Best Marketing Operation on Madison Avenue. Nobody put it on her business card.

    Marketing lessons from the most underestimated operator in Mad Men – with a detour through a 1960 television studio and a green cartoon owl.

    EVERYBODY QUOTES DON. NOBODY BILLS LIKE JOAN.

    Don Draper gets the mug, the poster, and the LinkedIn carousel. Fine – he was a spectacular closer. But he was a spectacular closer inside an agency that would have folded around season two without Joan Holloway Harris keeping the lights on, the staff paid, and the clients calm.

    Don sold the dream. Joan built the machine that delivered it, invoiced for it, staffed it, and quietly cleaned up after it. For four seasons her official title was “office manager.”

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  • Subtract Nine Channels: Here are some Scissors

    1. The Twenty-Seven Minute Problem

    • 70% of small business owners spend under five hours a week on marketing. That is Fiverr’s May 2025 survey of nearly 6,000 businesses across 25 countries. Their top worries were brand awareness (42%), creating content (40%), and keeping customers (33%). All three are jobs that reward showing up over and over.
    • At the same time, the channel count keeps climbing. Taradel’s 2025 survey found 81% of small businesses now run two or more channels, and the share running on a single channel fell from over 24% in 2022 to 11.5%. Most run three to four. One in ten runs six or more.
    • Now do the arithmetic. Eleven touchpoints. Five hours. Twenty-seven minutes each per week, which buys you one scheduled post, a glance at a dashboard, and a vague feeling of being behind.
    • The menu grows faster than the week. Scott Brinker’s 2025 martech landscape counted 15,384 products in 49 categories, up 9% in a year and roughly 100 times the 150 he mapped in 2011. Your Tuesday is still twenty-four hours long.
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  • The Pete Campbell Playbook: 5 Marketing Lessons

    Five marketing lessons from the most punchable man on Madison Avenue – and one very expensive lesson about all-nighters.

    Nobody wants to be Pete Campbell. That is more or less the point of him. Matthew Weiner built the character to be irritating on contact: the voice, the hairline that recedes like a punishment for something he did in a previous life, the rifle he acquired by returning a wedding gift. Don Draper gets the monologues. Pete gets the wince.

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  • The Untranslated Market: 70 Million Customers, an Empty Results Page, and a Three-Dollar Translation Bill

    Every large American metro contains a substantial buying population that does business in Spanish, Portuguese, Vietnamese, Mandarin, Tagalog, or Haitian Creole. Almost every supplier trying to sell to them publishes in English only. What follows is the size of that gap and what it costs to close.

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