A decade of work led here.
At Chop Dawg, I saw other people’s products succeed and fail. At Original Pixel, I owned more of the business. ModLinQ brought focus; Sweet Ride brought experienced collaborators; Bindr brought the fastest growth I had experienced.
Across those companies, building the product became a challenge I felt I could solve. Repeatable distribution still felt unresolved, from the first users to enterprise-scale audiences. ColdStart is my attempt to work on that missing piece. The starting point is a product people already want. If nobody wants it, more distribution won’t solve the underlying problem.
Winning the room.
ColdStart took first place at Startupfest in Montréal, then was selected as the winner of the Plug and Play Innovation Challenge and invited to present on stage in Europe to the leaders of a global industry. It was a surreal experience, and truthfully this entire company has been that.
The lesson was the same one I keep relearning: a product people want is the entry ticket. The system that gets it in front of the right people is what wins.
Close the loop between discovery and content.
ColdStart’s work centers on understanding visibility across search, social and AI discovery, then using those signals to inform what a company creates next. The thesis is a continuous loop: observe, understand, build, distribute and learn.
01 / Understand the demand
Start with the questions people ask, the places they ask them and the alternatives they consider. The useful unit is a real customer need.
02 / Build something worth finding
Match the page, answer or experience to that need. Product knowledge and clear evidence matter because visibility without relevance rarely creates a durable advantage.
03 / Feed the results back
What people find, what they engage with and what changes in the discovery environment should inform the next decision. The goal is a learning system that improves with use.
Built from the operator’s side.
I came to this through building companies and feeling the distribution problem firsthand. That changes the question I ask of a growth tool: does it help the business reach the people it was built for?
A ranking is an observation. A mention is an observation. Their value depends on what happens next. The business needs a connection between discovery, product engagement and meaningful outcomes.
Technical.ly told the ColdStart origin story: a dating app that struggled to get new users, and the AI marketing company that came out of solving it. Startupfest’s profile covers my role and ColdStart’s focus.
Still building the repeatable model.
The ambition is larger than any one channel. Search engines, AI answers and the conversations around a brand all influence how people discover it. I want the work that connects those surfaces to become more repeatable.
Explore ColdStartRead how I think about growth