The founder

Rhythm

We set out to fix one problem. Without meaning to, we became the world's first.

For every $1 a company spends on marketing tools, it spends about $5 on people to act on what the tools find. The dashboards are good. The lists they produce are long. The lists become tickets, and the tickets wait.

We set out to remove part of that $5. So we built an engine that works through the list itself. It fixes the site, publishes the article, answers the review and schedules the post, and each one waits for your yes before it goes live. We built it the unglamorous way, one client request at a time, until it covered the map, search, AI answers, social and reviews.

Only when we sat down to write out what we had built did we ask whether anyone else did all of it. We looked hard and could not find one. That is how CLEO became the world's first engine to run a brand's entire presence, from the map to the model, autonomously, under your approval. Not by aiming at it. By following one problem to the end, then looking up.

I built the platform underneath CLEO myself, every layer of it, before anyone else joined. Today there are sixteen of us, and no investor money in what we built. Every line of spend has been covered by me or by a paying client. Working without outside capital imposes a discipline that capital tends to excuse. We automate our own work before we hire for it, which is why CLEO's own marketing runs on CLEO: the cheapest proof we can offer that it works. That is how the engine was built for less.

Our validation came from clients, not from a funding round. We grew on revenue rather than on the sugar rush of someone else's money. It also means there is no sales floor. I make the calls. Some meetings are with the chief executive. Some are with the most junior person in the building, sent to find out whether I am worth thirty minutes. I take both. The product has to earn the next meeting either way.

I am prouder of this team than of anything written on this site. Because we are small, I also carry the work founders usually hand off: the architecture, the contracts, the finance, the patents. It keeps me close to what a small business is up against, and that is the point. Our vision is to make technology accessible, so that a firm of twelve can have what once needed a department. One twelve-person client went from 17% to 67% of AI citations in 90 days.

I keep a low personal profile. The work is the introduction.