Where I am now — and how I got here
Five chapters, newest first. I start with what I'm building today and work back to the Verizon sales floor where it began. Each chapter is the ground the one above it stands on.
The through-line, looking back: every chapter got me closer to what makes a buyer act — programmatically. I started by talking to people one at a time and ended up building the systems that talk to thousands of them at once.
This is the v1. It's honest about the parts I'm still figuring out.
1. Marketing Engineer — what's next, in public
2025 – Now
The "marketing engineer" framing comes from the team at Profound — an AEO/GEO platform — and it captures what every prior chapter was secretly building toward. Someone who builds the marketing systems they write about.
Pronto Conversions is the first product I shipped in this chapter — AI speed-to-lead for pest control and home-services teams. Solo founder + CTO. Stack: Next.js, Twilio, Claude API, Vercel. The system qualifies inbound leads and routes them to the right rep in under 60 seconds.
Revenue Leak Scanner came next — a $7 audit tool that connects Klaviyo and Shopify, surfaces revenue gaps, tells you exactly where to fix them. Same stack. Live on Meta paid acquisition.
Both products started as decks I would have made for a client and ended as software they could buy. That's the change I'm making.
I'm looking for a team where this combination — retention systems depth, buyer psychology, AI-native execution — is the thing they need, not a novelty.
What this chapter is for: stop writing about systems someone else has to implement. Build them, and let the writing be the documentation.
What it's built on: everything below — four chapters of getting closer to the buyer, one layer at a time. ↓
2. Landing Pages — FERMÀT Commerce
2022 – 2025
Agency Growth Manager at FERMÀT Commerce — built the partner program from zero. Seven months: 2 → 13 partners, $1M+ ARR, NDR above 100%, zero churn. A partner program is a landing page for revenue: same architecture, same friction points, same compounding logic.
What this taught me: partnerships are landing pages for revenue. The product behind the page is the other half of the system.
What it was built on: the retention systems below — same compounding logic, one layer down. ↓
3. Retention Marketing
2018 – 2022
Four years of CRO and retention work for 50+ Shopify DTC brands — $7.3M+ documented revenue. Twillory was the standout: 21 months, $3.25M attributed. Pet Wellness Direct was the lesson in compounding — four automated engines (email, SMS, cart, review recovery) I built in 2021 were still generating revenue in 2026 with zero maintenance.
What this taught me: the system is the asset.
What it was built on: the copy discipline below — a retention system is structured persuasion, automated. ↓
4. Copywriting + Email Marketing
2016 – 2018
Hand-copied 90 sales letters early on — the Drayton Bird / Halbert / Hopkins canon, plus modern long-form. The discipline of writing them out was the only thing that made the structures stick.
What this taught me: words on a page are mechanical. You can take them apart and put them back together. The bad copy isn't bad because the writer was untalented; it's bad because the structure was wrong, and the structure can be fixed without changing the topic.
What it was built on: the doorstep below — every structure I respected on the page, I first heard spoken out loud. ↓
5. Sales — Verizon and DirecTV
2013 – 2016
Started on the Verizon sales floor, then DirecTV doorsteps in the Texas heat. Two things stuck: the "yes" wasn't the hard part — keeping the buyer comfortable with the decision the day after they signed was the entire game. And every objection I heard a hundred times was a clue that the same sentence, written somewhere upstream, was failing.
What this taught me: you don't get to skip the human part of buying.
Where it started: a Verizon sales floor and a Texas doorstep. Everything above grew out of this.
If you want to talk about hiring or just the work — jesseb.06@gmail.com.