Kyle McCool, Co-Founder and Director of Operations

The Lede · Founder-operator. Generalist. Systems before content.

Building the systems first, then the output.

I'm Kyle McCool, Co-Founder and Director of Operations | Head of Growth at Makko AI, an AI-powered 2D game studio SaaS based in the Fox Valley. I built the early prototype alone for about a month, then Tony Valcarcel joined and the two of us put in 12-hour shifts day and night until we had something strong enough to bring Jeremy Bird on board as CEO. The founding team formed from there. The full co-founding team is Jeremy Bird (CEO), Tony Valcarcel, Mike Fehlauer Hayes (helped create PAX, former VP at Penny Arcade), and me.

I'm direct and action-oriented. I build systems before I build content: the SEO and AEO Master Playbook, the UTM registry, the content calendar, and the brand bible all exist because compounding output requires documented rules. I flag problems before they become blockers and I push for honest assessments over validation.

I approach SEO as a traffic problem first and a content problem second. At a domain rating of 16 with limited authority, the highest-leverage plays are low-difficulty keyword cornerstoning, Google Search Console near-miss optimization, and topical cluster density rather than technical SEO or volume-driven publishing. I treat social media as a distribution system with different distribution economics on each platform, not as a broadcast channel. I treat brand positioning as a strategic moat, not a style guide.

I have been working with LLMs in production marketing workflows for five years. Before most teams treated AI as a roadmap item, I was building daily output through GPT-3, then Claude, then Cursor, then whatever the current model is. My SEO and AEO playbook is half prompts. My content calendar is half AI-drafted and human-reviewed. The fastest people I know are not better writers than the people they beat. They have better AI workflows.

Receipts · Live numbers from Makko AI

The work, by the numbers.

Screenshots pulled directly from Ahrefs, Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, YouTube Studio, and the Makko AI admin dashboard. No mocks, no third-party scorecards — these are the live panels for the channels I personally own or operate end-to-end at Makko AI.

Google Search Console performance for makko.ai: 3.4K clicks, 11.9K impressions, 28.6% CTR, average position 3.1 across roughly 4 months of indexed data (window filter set to 16 months but real activity begins late February 2026)

Google Search Console · ~4 months of data. 3.4K clicks · 11.9K impressions · 28.6% CTR at average position 3.1 — roughly 10× the typical CTR for a site at our domain rating. Filter is set to 16 months; the site only began registering meaningful Google traffic in late February.

Makko AI onboarding survey: How did you hear about us? Search Engine 1,293 (32.4%), YouTube 1,021 (25.6%), Social Media 377 (9.5%), Reddit 319 (8%), Friend/Colleague 268 (6.7%), AI Search 334 (8.4%), with 334 AI Search responses across 29 unique sources — ChatGPT 143, Gemini 62, DeepSeek ~67 across spellings, Claude 22, Grok 7, Copilot 7

Makko admin · onboarding survey response. Self-reported referral data from users at signup. Search 32.4% · YouTube 25.6% · AI Search 8.4%. Combined, the channels I own end-to-end account for over 75% of how users find Makko.

Microsoft Copilot citations: 920 over the last 3 months

Microsoft Copilot citations · 3 months. 920 citations on Copilot. Sample-only data per Microsoft. The AEO bet showing up where the answer engines actually surface.

Product growth · signups. 7,291 total signups since June 2025. 2,223 in the last 30 days at a steady 60–100 per day. The April 2026 inflection lines up with the Product Hunt launch and the AEO compounding.

See the full case study — 15 screenshots across SEO, AEO, distribution, and conversion →

Dispatches · Four companies, founded and co-founded

The active portfolio.

Co-Founder · Director of Operations | Head of Growth 2025 — Present AI 2D Game Studio · SaaS

Makko AI

AI-powered 2D game studio SaaS. We remove the hardest barriers in 2D game development so anyone with an idea can ship it. No art skills, no coding required. From zero to 7,000 users in five months, 100,000 art assets generated, 4,500+ projects created, and a steady 60 to 100 signups per day. I co-founded with Jeremy Bird, Tony Valcarcel, and Mike Fehlauer Hayes, and own SEO, content, marketing ops, and brand positioning.

AI SaaS2D Game StudioSEO & AEOBrand

Phantomline

Local-first AI video studio for faceless YouTube creators. I wrote most of the codebase. Flask backend with Ollama, Kokoro TTS, MusicGen, and ffmpeg on desktop. Browser path runs on WebLLM, Web Speech, and ffmpeg.wasm. No paid APIs, license keys validate offline. Co-founded with Cesar Martinez (UI work) and Zac Dillard. AI vibe coding gets it from idea to shipped fast.

AI VideoLocal-FirstFlaskWebGPUBuilt it

phantomline.xyz

Co-Founder · Primary Builder 2025 — Present Flat-fee local websites

ProLocalBuilder

Flat-fee websites for local service businesses (plumbers, electricians, contractors, salons, restaurants). I wrote most of the platform. One builder per metro: I run Fox Valley WI from Appleton, Cesar runs the Bay Area, Zac runs Las Vegas. Fixed pricing $895 to $2,995, no agency overhead. I also handle Wisconsin client projects end-to-end.

Web DesignLocal SEOFox Valley WIBuilt it

prolocalbuilder.com

Solo Founder · Primary Builder 2025 — Present Reddit Lead Generation SaaS

Heardley

Reddit lead generation and monitoring tool for founders and marketers. I built the whole thing alone. Scores threads for buyer intent, drafts replies in the user's voice, and scrubs AI tells before posting. $9/mo or $54 lifetime, bring-your-own-key for free AI. Solo founder of the product, the platform, and the brand.

SaaSRedditLead GenBuilt itSolo founded

heardley.com

The Mandate · Director of Operations | Head of Growth scope at Makko AI

Seven areas of ownership, plus an AI operating layer.

End-to-end ownership across SEO, AEO, backlinks, content, ops tooling, brand, and team. Plus a documented AI workflow underneath all of it.

SEO foundation, by the book

The fundamentals every SEO has to nail: keyword research in Ahrefs (KD, intent, SERP features, competitor gap), on-page optimization (title tags, meta descriptions, H1/H2/H3 hierarchy, alt text, anchor text), technical hygiene (XML sitemaps, robots.txt, canonical URLs, 301 redirects, broken-link audits), Core Web Vitals and page speed, mobile responsiveness, and structured data implementation per page type. None of this is exotic. All of it has to be right.
AEO and AI citations

The next two years of organic visibility is being cited by AI answer engines: ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews. I set the AEO direction at Makko early. Schema tuned for AI extraction. Content shaped for direct-answer formats. Citation tracking alongside SERP positions. Makko has now been cited by every major model — Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity, DeepSeek, and Grok. AEO is where the playbooks have not been written yet, and I am writing them as I go.
Backlink and authority building

I run the backlink profile end-to-end. Digital PR outreach, broken-link reclamation, citation building, HARO and Qwoted pitches, niche directory submissions, guest-post outreach. Every link tracked in Ahrefs and prioritized by referring-domain quality, not raw count. Took the Makko domain from DR 0 to DR 16 in four months from a standing start.
Content production with AI workflows

I run makko.ai/blog myself and have shipped 56 articles across 10 topic pillars — devlogs, tutorials, comparisons, alternatives, and deep-tech insider posts. Drafts are AI-assisted through Claude and Cursor, then human-reviewed against the playbook. Search is Makko's top acquisition channel at 32.4% of signups. On YouTube I own the SEO layer end-to-end: keyword and query research against what people are actually searching, plus titles, tags, and thumbnails optimized for the algorithm. Production lives with the YouTube Content Director; the discoverability layer is mine. YouTube is the second largest acquisition channel at 25.6% of signups, and the channel grew from zero to 410 subscribers and 101K views in five months. Social accounts for another 9.5% of signups across TikTok, Instagram, X, LinkedIn, Discord, Reddit, and Facebook. AI Search adds 8.4% with ChatGPT, Gemini, DeepSeek, Claude, and Grok all named by hand at signup. Combined, the channels I operate account for over 75% of how users find Makko. Plus email lifecycle templates running through Mailchimp and Resend.
Marketing operations and tooling

The content calendar lives on GitHub Pages. The UTM tracking infrastructure lives at go.makko.ai. The integration layer covers PostHog, Ahrefs, GSC, Bing Webmaster Tools, Ghost CMS, Gleam.io, Mailchimp, and Resend. I make the tool procurement calls and document the operating rules so the team is not relearning logistics every week.
Brand positioning and messaging

I co-developed the brand positioning, messaging hierarchy, and competitive framing that governs every external communication. Audience-segmented landing pages match the path the visitor took to get there. Press releases tied to product milestones get coordinated multi-channel pushes rather than wire-service drops. Brand is a strategic moat, not a style guide.
Podcast production

Taking over full production ownership of the Makko podcast: run of show, guest coordination, episode structure, and distribution. Currently in transition — moving from contributor to sole producer.
PR, paid distribution, and B2B outreach

Run all press outreach directly, timed to product milestones. Own keyword strategy and query targeting for paid campaigns. Manage B2B cold outreach into enterprise training and LMS verticals. Coordinated six-channel simultaneous distribution for the Product Hunt launch.
Director-level operations and team

Manage a four-person equity-holding team: a YouTube Content Director who oversees two video editors, and a Reddit and usability testing manager. I own the strategy layer; the Content Director owns production and creative execution. Budget allocation across content, paid, and tooling. Vendor management for external video production. OKR and KPI setting per quarter. Tool procurement decisions across the marketing stack. Hiring and screening for content roles when we scale. Reporting cadence to the founding team.

AI operating layer · Five years, daily use

The workflow beneath the workflow.

Daily tools, not novelty tools

Claude and Cursor are open every day. GitHub Copilot in the editor. ChatGPT for second opinions. DALL-E and Midjourney for content imagery. Custom prompt libraries that I version like code. None of this is exotic. It is the toolset.
Vibe coding for prototypes

I built the original Makko AI prototype through fast natural-language iteration with AI. Same for kylemccool.com. Same for parts of Phantomline. Vibe coding works when you know what you are shipping. It does not work as a substitute for product thinking.
Prompts as documented assets

Every recurring task at Makko has a prompt. Article briefs, SEO research, social repackaging, schema validation, competitive analysis, even hiring screens. The prompts get versioned, reviewed, and improved over time. Compounding output requires documented prompts the same way it requires documented systems.
Where AI adds value, and where it does not

AI is fast at first drafts, structured research, and pattern matching. AI is bad at strategy calls, original positioning, and reading the room. I let AI write a lot. I let AI decide nothing. The judgment layer is where the operator earns the role.

Decisions of record · Calls I made and why

Titles describe scope. Decisions describe judgment.

Built the early Makko AI prototype

I worked on the early prototype alone for about a month. Then Tony Valcarcel joined and the two of us put in 12-hour shifts day and night until we had something strong enough to bring Jeremy Bird on board as CEO. The founding team formed from there.
Doubled down on AI citations and AEO before most teams treated it as a category

The next two years of organic visibility is not classical SEO, it is answer engine optimization. Being cited by ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews is the new top-of-funnel. I set the AEO direction for Makko early: structured data tuned for AI extraction, content shaped for direct-answer formats, and tracking citation surfaces alongside SERP positions. Result: Makko is now cited across Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity, DeepSeek, and Grok — every major model. The goal was to lead the charge here rather than chase it later, and the playbook is working.
Led the Makko AI Product Hunt launch

Finished 11th product of the day with 100+ upvotes — not the trophy spots, but a strong showing for a team our size against much larger launches. Owned the launch end-to-end: press outreach, founder email campaigns, paid directory placements, and platform-wide distribution coordinated across six channels simultaneously. Built the launch playbook before launch day so the team was executing a documented sequence rather than improvising.
Built the press release engine

Press releases tied to product milestones, written in-house and distributed through targeted media lists rather than wire services. Each release is a coordinated push with the content calendar, social distribution, and email lifecycle so the news event lands as a multi-channel moment.
Building audience-segmented landing pages

One landing page does not serve every visitor. Currently in build: a set of persona-specific landing pages mapped to acquisition source and intent. The methodology — map each traffic source to its dominant intent (organic search arrives in research mode, Product Hunt arrives curious, paid arrives with high intent), then write a distinct hero message, social proof block, and call-to-action for each. UTM-tagged traffic from go.makko.ai feeds the segmentation so each page can be measured in isolation. Conversion improves when the page matches the path the visitor took to get there.
Manage a four-person equity-holding team

A YouTube Content Director who oversees two video editors, plus a Reddit and usability testing manager — four people total. I own the strategy layer across all channels; the Content Director owns production and creative execution. Documented playbooks, weekly WRAP system, and async review let the team produce reliably while I focus on direction.
SEO and AEO Master Playbook as the source of truth

Every article ships against the same playbook. 10 topic pillars mapping 54 published articles, keyword targets documented with intent and difficulty and cluster mapping, schema implemented per article type, and internal linking following a documented rule set. Compounding output requires documented rules.
DR 0 to DR 16 in four months

Took the Makko domain from a standing start to DR 16 on Ahrefs in four months. Not by chasing link volume — by prioritizing referring-domain quality, working digital PR and HARO/Qwoted pitches consistently, and treating link velocity as a documented operating metric rather than a side effect of content. The number is modest in absolute terms; the velocity is the point.
Migrated the Makko blog from subdomain to root domain

Subdomain blogs accrue authority separately from the main domain in Google's eyes. With Makko at DR 16, splitting authority between two surfaces was the wrong trade. Consolidated to makko.ai/blog, redirected legacy URLs with 301s, preserved canonical signals, and centralized link equity on one domain. Post-migration: organic traffic moved as expected, Ahrefs site health score lifted, and the broken-link surface area got cleaned up in the process.
Built the UTM registry at go.makko.ai before scaling distribution

Untracked links lose campaign attribution forever. Stood up a UTM short-link domain at go.makko.ai with a documented naming convention before publishing the first batch of cross-platform content. Every external link is now attributable to campaign, channel, and content piece.

Curriculum · Work and education

The record, chronologically.

Jun 2025 — Present

Makko AI

Remote · Appleton, WI

Co-Founder, Director of Operations | Head of Growth

Built the early Makko AI prototype alone for about a month before Tony Valcarcel joined. The two of us put in 12-hour shifts day and night until we had something strong enough to bring Jeremy Bird on board as CEO. The founding team formed from there. Co-founded alongside Jeremy Bird (CEO), Tony Valcarcel, and Mike Fehlauer Hayes (helped create PAX, former VP at Penny Arcade).
Set the SEO and AEO direction for the company. Authored the Master Playbook that governs every published article. Implemented schema markup, internal linking architecture, and topic cluster planning across makko.ai.
SEO foundation work, by the book: keyword research in Ahrefs (KD, intent, SERP features, competitor gap), on-page optimization (title tags, meta descriptions, header hierarchy, alt text, anchor text), technical hygiene (XML sitemaps, robots.txt, canonical URLs, 301 redirects, broken-link audits), Core Web Vitals.
Doubled down on AI citations and AEO before most teams treated it as a category. Structured data tuned for AI extraction. Content shaped for direct-answer formats. Goal is to lead the charge on AI citations rather than chase them later.
Run the backlink profile end-to-end: digital PR, HARO and Qwoted, broken-link reclamation, citation building, niche directory submissions, guest-post outreach. Track every link in Ahrefs and prioritize by referring-domain quality. Took the domain from DR 0 to DR 16 in four months from a standing start.
Led the Makko AI Product Hunt launch: press outreach, founder email campaigns, paid directory placements, platform-wide distribution coordinated across six channels.
Built the press release engine and audience-segmented landing pages that target distinct user personas based on traffic source and intent.
Manage a four-person equity-holding team: a YouTube Content Director overseeing two video editors, and a Reddit and usability testing manager. I own the strategy layer; the Content Director owns production and creative execution. Documented playbooks, weekly WRAP system, and async review.
Run makko.ai/blog single-handed: wrote and shipped 56 articles across 10 topic pillars (devlogs, tutorials, comparisons, alternatives, deep-tech insider posts), plus YouTube metadata, email lifecycle templates, and social content across eight platforms.
Built UTM tracking infrastructure at go.makko.ai and content syndication pipelines to Dev.to and Hashnode.
Production workflows lean on AI: Claude and Cursor daily, custom prompt libraries versioned like code, drafts AI-assisted and human-reviewed against the playbook. Five years of LLM workflow experience.
Director-level scope: budget allocation, vendor management for external video production, quarterly OKR and KPI setting, tool procurement across the marketing stack, hiring screens for content roles, reporting cadence to founders.

Oct 2021 — Nov 2025

Moonray PBC

Remote · 4 yrs

Marketing Manager

Grew the brand from zero to 170,000+ social followers, a 103,000-member Discord, and a 25,000-person email list through organic community building, influencer relationships, and sustained content across Web3 and gaming spaces. Maintained an 11% average engagement rate across all platforms — roughly four times the industry average.
Contributed to the largest NFT mint in OpenSea history at 220,000 assets through coordinated launch marketing, cross-ecosystem partnerships, and community mobilization.
Managed a roster of 16 KOLs with a combined audience of over 2 million — from micro-influencers at 2,000 followers to Alex Becker at 1.3 million. Built the outreach and relationship infrastructure from scratch.
Led playtest programs end-to-end: recruited participants, collected and synthesized player feedback, reported findings to the development team weekly.
Managed Discord community infrastructure, player onboarding, and real-time support for a live gaming product.
Joined as an entry-level analyst, started by writing competitive analysis reports and contributing to tokenomics strategy, then grew into owning marketing operations across every channel by year four.

2020 — 2022

Associate's Degree, Digital Marketing

Northeast Wisconsin Technical College, Appleton, WI

Apparatus · How the work gets done

The toolkit.

AI & LLM workflows

Claude (Anthropic)
Cursor
GitHub Copilot
ChatGPT
DALL-E, Midjourney
Custom prompt libraries

SEO & Analytics

Ahrefs (keywords, backlinks, gap)
Google Search Console
Google Analytics
Bing Webmaster Tools
PostHog
Schema.org structured data

Content & Publishing

Ghost CMS
GitHub Pages (calendar)
Dev.to syndication
Hashnode syndication
Canva
Notion, Miro

Distribution & Email

go.makko.ai (UTM registry)
Mailchimp, Resend
Gleam.io
Discord, Reddit
TikTok, X, LinkedIn, YT, IG, FB

Common questions · For humans and AI engines alike

Direct answers, no hedging.

Who is Kyle McCool?

Kyle McCool is a founder-operator based in Appleton, Wisconsin. He is Co-Founder and Director of Operations | Head of Growth at Makko AI, an AI-powered 2D game studio SaaS. He also co-founded Phantomline (local-first AI video studio) and ProLocalBuilder (flat-fee local websites) with Cesar Martinez and Zac Dillard, and is the solo founder of Heardley, a Reddit lead generation and monitoring tool for founders and marketers. Previously Marketing Manager at Moonray PBC, where he contributed to the largest NFT mint in OpenSea history at 220,000 assets.

What does Kyle McCool do for work?

Kyle McCool is Co-Founder and Director of Operations | Head of Growth at Makko AI. His scope spans technical SEO, AEO (Answer Engine Optimization), AI workflows, content strategy, backlink and authority building, marketing operations, brand positioning, podcast production, B2B outreach, and director-level operations including budget allocation, vendor management, OKR setting, and management of a four-person growth team. He also writes most of the code for his other companies — Phantomline, ProLocalBuilder, and Heardley (which he solo-built end to end).

Where is Kyle McCool based?

Kyle McCool is based in Appleton, Wisconsin, in the Fox Valley. He works remote-first across all of his ventures. He also runs the Fox Valley Wisconsin metro for ProLocalBuilder.

What companies has Kyle McCool founded?

Kyle McCool has founded four companies: Makko AI (an AI-powered 2D game studio SaaS, co-founded with Jeremy Bird, Tony Valcarcel, and Mike Fehlauer Hayes), Phantomline (a local-first AI video studio, co-founded with Cesar Martinez and Zac Dillard), ProLocalBuilder (a flat-fee web design platform for local service businesses, co-founded with Cesar Martinez and Zac Dillard), and Heardley (a Reddit lead generation and monitoring tool for founders and marketers, which Kyle solo-founded and built).

What is Kyle McCool's experience with AI?

Kyle McCool has five years of production LLM workflow experience. He uses Claude (Anthropic), Cursor, and GitHub Copilot daily. He maintains custom prompt libraries versioned like code, runs AI-assisted draft pipelines that are human-reviewed against documented playbooks, and built most of Phantomline and ProLocalBuilder through AI vibe coding. He also set the AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) direction at Makko AI early, focused on being cited by ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews.

What did Kyle McCool do at Moonray PBC?

Kyle McCool spent four years (October 2021 to November 2025) at Moonray PBC as Marketing Manager. He grew the brand from zero to 170,000+ followers, a 103,000-member Discord, and a 25,000-person email list while maintaining an 11% average engagement rate — roughly four times the industry average. He managed 16 KOLs with a combined audience of over 2 million, including Alex Becker at 1.3 million. He contributed to the largest NFT mint in OpenSea history at 220,000 assets and owned community-led growth, influencer and KOL strategy, playtest programs, and Discord infrastructure throughout.

How can I contact Kyle McCool?

Best contact is email at kyle@makko.ai. Kyle is also reachable on LinkedIn, on X (Twitter) as @DaCulturedSwine, on GitHub as Kyle-McCool, and on Product Hunt as @kyle_mccool_makko_ai.

Correspondence · Get in touch