I've been building brands since high school. My first real job was a webmaster for a three-person real estate team, family friends who asked, "Are you good with computers?" I said yes. I'd never built a website in my life, but I'd messed around building maps in a browser game called Haxball, and I knew I was good with computers and willing to outwork anyone. So I took it head-on. Over three years, I rebuilt and managed their five websites, ran their ad campaigns, wrote the blogs for newtopias.com, and got my first taste of lead generation. I loved every second. I even worked my way up to real estate agent, long enough to learn I'm a much better webmaster than I am an agent.

That kicked off the pattern that's defined everything since: I'll figure it out. When I moved to Long Island, a colleague asked if I knew how to put a shopping cart on a website. I'd never touched e-commerce. I said no, but how hard could it be? So I taught myself, and built a small grassroots brand its first real sales funnel from the ground up: a full storefront, email and SMS, shipping worked into their workflow, and a rebrand that matched the loyal following they'd grown organically on Twitter. The brand didn't survive, but the skills did. It's where I learned e-commerce by doing it.

At Bedgear I jumped from tiny projects into a corporate e-commerce department. I was hired as a junior paid media planner; about three months in, nearly the whole team left, and I was suddenly running paid media and email from concept to execution. I introduced SMS, built their Klaviyo flows, added on-site email capture, took Facebook ROAS from 0.3 to 1.5, and expanded marketing into Canada and Australia. Going from junior to running a brand across international markets was a crash course, and I figured it out.

Now I'm webmaster and operations manager at Open Box Pallet Liquidation. I came in to learn reselling from the ground up (packing, shipping, the logistics I'd always dodged with drop-shipping) and grew their eBay store from 12 reviews to 1,600+ at a 99.8% rating, listing 20–30 items a day and treating it like a real brand instead of a junk drawer. In August 2025 they handed me longislandliquidation.com: crosslisting, individual items, mystery boxes, pallet sales, freight estimates, truckload lead nurturing, and a branding hub, all in one. It's the most complex thing I've built. As the longest-standing employee on an 8–10 person team, I've also taken on hiring, training, truckload buying, and floor planning. Whatever the business needs. The real job is finding what's slow, broken, or missing and building the system that fixes it, usually one that wasn't there before I showed up. I think on my feet and take ideas to finished fast. I adapt when short-term priorities change, and I keep the long-term ones moving at the same time.

The foundation is the real work: I taught myself e-commerce, paid media, brand, and operations by doing them, and I outwork a problem until it's solved. AI is the accelerator on top of that, not the engine. I've been pulling real quality out of these tools since 2022, when I built Wayward Third as a fully AI-generated brand, and today I use Claude to ship the polished email templates, landing pages, and automations that used to need a designer or developer I didn't have. The tools don't do the thinking. They just let a relentless figure-it-out-er finally execute every idea in his head.

I build things I wish existed. yardsalehopper.com came straight out of my own Friday-night frustration hunting yard sales across a dozen sites, so I built one that sweeps the web, collects the listings automatically, links back to the original posts, and maps the best route to hit them all. The roadblocks are the fun part. Put me on the right team and there's not much I can't build.