Nice to meet you.

My mission is to build businesses that serve life, not the other way around. I’ve developed a model for creating high-margin, self-managing companies designed to deliver time freedom and a meaningful impact. This exact model has been validated four separate times: through acquisitions by Semrush (NYSE:SEMR) in October 2025, as well as in July 2023, Google in 2014 and SEOJet in 2020. Below, I share the stories of how I built each business to thrive on its own, and the key lessons I learned during the process.

2022-2024: My fourth venture, TopicRanker was a direct response to the noise in keyword research. It was a purpose-built and launched as an app on Semrush app center called SERP Gap analyzer, designed to find easy-to-rank keywords by identifying where competitors were weak. It rapidly became the top-performing app in the Semrush App Center, proving its immense value to the community and ultimately leading to its acquisition by Semrush in October 2025.

2021-2023: I founded my third venture SmallBiz.Tools to help entrepreneurs navigate the crowded world of business software. We focused on creating a trusted affiliate review site with in-depth, honest reviews. The site quickly became a go-to resource, leading to its acquisition by Semrush (NYSE: SEMR) in 2023. Watch or listen to case study here.

2014-2020: In 2014, I founded my second venture, JustReachOut , to help small businesses navigate the world of public relations. Over six years, I built and scaled the company into an AI-powered SaaS tool that made it faster than ever to find and pitch podcasters and journalists. We empowered over 5K+ small businesses to land press without the expense of a PR firm. This journey led to the successful acquisition of JustReachOut by SEOJet in 2020, followed by a second acquisition in January 2024 by a team of early Slack employees. Read case study here.

2012-2014:  My journey into the startup world began as the only marketer for Polar Polls. On a lean team of five, I leveraged the power of PR to grow our user base exponentially, taking us from a new venture to a platform with over 40 million pageviews per month. This incredible growth captured the attention of Google, who acquired us in 2014. Google’s acquisition #166 dated September 11, 2014 see on Wikipedia. Read the case study here from start to acquisition.

I help market leaders dominate ranking on Google and LLMs. Since 2009, I’ve successfully ranked companies like Dow Jones, Realtor.com, Nextiva, Aura, Pipedrive, Wistia, CultureAmp, Backlinko, and Help Scout #1 on Google organic as well as AI for their most critical prompts and keywords. See the results in these case studies.