Co-Founder and Director of Operations at Makko AI, an AI-powered 2D game studio SaaS. I built the early prototype with Tony Valcarcel before the founding team came together. I built most of Phantomline and ProLocalBuilder with Cesar Martinez and Zac Dillard. Four years at Moonray PBC, where I contributed to the largest NFT mint in OpenSea history at 220,000 assets. Technical SEO, AEO, AI workflows. Based in Appleton, Wisconsin.
I'm Kyle McCool, Co-Founder and Director of Operations 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 (investor relations), 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 12 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.
Five years of production work with LLMs. Daily use, not hype.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Four primary areas. Each one I own end-to-end.
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.
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. AEO is where the playbooks have not been written yet, and I am writing them as I go.
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. DR is moving and the link velocity is documented.
I have shipped 48 published blog articles against documented prompt libraries. Drafts are AI-assisted through Claude and Cursor, then human-reviewed against the playbook. I also direct YouTube metadata, social content across TikTok, Instagram, X, LinkedIn, YouTube, Discord, Reddit, and Facebook, plus the email lifecycle templates running through Mailchimp and Resend.
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.
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.
Direct manager of two marketers. 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.
Job titles describe scope. These are the actual decisions.
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.
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. The goal is to lead the charge here rather than chase it later.
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.
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.
One landing page does not serve every visitor. Different traffic sources have different intent. I built persona-specific landing pages targeting distinct user segments with their own messaging hierarchy, social proof, and call-to-action. Conversion improves when the page matches the path the visitor took to get there.
I oversee two marketers and own consistency of output across the marketing function. The work that scales is the work that ships every week without me writing every word. Documented playbooks, weekly WRAP system, and async review let the team produce reliably while I focus on direction.
Every article ships against the same playbook. Topic clusters are planned ahead, keyword targets are documented with intent and difficulty and cluster mapping, schema is implemented per article type, and internal linking follows a documented rule set. Compounding output requires documented rules.
Subdomain blogs accrue authority separately from the main domain in Google's eyes. With Makko at DR 12, 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.
TikTok, Reddit, X, LinkedIn, Discord, YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook each have different distribution economics. Same source content gets repackaged per platform with platform-native hooks rather than cross-posted as-is. UTM tracking through go.makko.ai measures which platforms convert versus which just generate traffic.
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.
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. I co-founded with Jeremy Bird, Tony Valcarcel, and Mike Fehlauer Hayes, and own SEO, content, marketing ops, and brand positioning.
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.
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.
Northeast Wisconsin Technical College, Appleton, WI
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