I help early-stage founders get from working prototype to paying customers.
Twenty years across the stack as a freelancer, startup co-founder, first engineer, and Fortune 100 engineer. I help technical founders sell, and non-technical founders ship.
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Proof
Fortune 100 engineering. Nine years at IBM, first as a Staff Software Engineer and since 2020 as an Advisory Software Engineer. I joined the component library team two weeks into the job, before it was Carbon, and helped open-source it. I then started and open-sourced Carbon UI Builder, and more recently IBM VIBE, a platform for testing whether AI agents actually hold up. I led the team that shipped Carbon's Angular implementation. I am a named inventor on several IBM patents, and I won IBM Canada's Excellence in Programming award, given to one developer a year across the country.
Audiences from zero. I grew a cooking personality's following past 100,000 on Google+, and built m.otivate.me from nothing to over a million daily hits. Both died when Google shut down Google+ and took the traffic with it. I know how to build an audience; I also know what it costs to build one on someone else's land.
Currently in it. I'm building upschooler, a local network for families educating outside the default path. The 0→1 problems I advise on are ones I'm solving this week.
What I actually do
Prototype to product. You have something that works. It won't survive twenty users, or a hundred, or the first enterprise buyer who asks about your data model. I'll tell you what breaks first and what to do about it.
Fractional technical leadership. Senior engineering judgment on the decisions that are expensive to reverse, without hiring a CTO you can't afford yet.
Positioning and launch. Most early products fail to sell because nobody can explain them, not because they're bad. I've built the thing and sold the thing, and I can tell which problem you have.
I also ship tools at zees.tools.
I take on a small number of engagements at a time. If you're at the point where the build is real but the revenue isn't, that's the conversation I'm most useful in.
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