The Small-Business Problem That Led Me Here

Over seven years as president of Student Marketing Agency, I had more than 12,000 conversations with small-business owners. Different industries, different sizes, different markets, different challenges — but underneath all of that variation, I kept encountering essentially the same problem.

They knew they needed marketing. Not vaguely, but specifically. They understood, often with considerable clarity, that growing a business required strategy, content, analytics, consistent publishing, ongoing optimization, and someone capable of coordinating all of it over time.

They were not confused about what good marketing looked like. They simply could not afford it.

The Gap Nobody Could Close

Doing marketing properly at that level requires a team, or at minimum a very capable marketing director who can hold the whole function together. For most small businesses, either option is simply out of reach financially.

So they would do what they could. Maybe hire someone part-time to post on social media. Maybe run some ads. Maybe refresh the website. And the rest — the strategy, the coordination, the continuous learning and adjustment — would go undone. Not because the owners did not understand its value. Because they could not resource it.

I spent years watching sophisticated marketing remain inaccessible to the businesses that arguably needed it most. Owners who had built something real, who understood their customers deeply, who had something worth marketing — but who could not afford to market it properly.

That gap stayed with me.

Why the Problem Came First

It is the problem that eventually led me here. Not excitement about AI as a technology, not an interest in building something clever, but a real and persistent problem I had watched thousands of businesses struggle with, and a growing conviction that AI was finally becoming capable of solving it in a way that nothing before it had been.

The best innovations I know of did not start with a technology looking for a problem. They started with a problem that had been understood deeply enough to recognize when technology finally became capable of solving it.