I'm Co-Founder and Director of Operations at Makko AI, an AI-powered 2D game studio SaaS. 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. Today I own technical SEO, AEO, content, AI workflows, and marketing operations.
Makko AI is an AI-powered 2D game studio SaaS. The pitch is direct: remove the hardest barriers in 2D game development so anyone with an idea can ship a game. No art skills required. No coding required.
The founding team is four people: Jeremy Bird (Co-Founder, CEO and CTO), Anthony "Tony" Valcarcel (Co-Founder, Investor Relations), Mike Fehlauer Hayes (Co-Founder, helped create PAX and former VP of Penny Arcade), and me (Co-Founder, Director of Operations).
I built the early prototype alone for about a month. Then Tony Valcarcel joined and the two of us worked 12-hour shifts day and night for weeks until we had something strong enough to bring Jeremy Bird on board as CEO. Mike Fehlauer Hayes joined after that. The founding team formed around what Tony and I had built together.
The fundamentals every SEO has to nail: 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 and page speed, mobile responsiveness, structured data 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, HARO and Qwoted pitching, broken-link reclamation, citation building, niche directory placements, guest-post outreach. Every link tracked in Ahrefs and prioritized by referring-domain quality rather than raw count. Documented link velocity reported to founders monthly.
I have shipped 48 published blog articles against the playbook. Drafts run through Claude and Cursor with custom prompt libraries that I version like code. Every draft is human-reviewed before publishing. I also direct YouTube metadata, social content across eight platforms, and email lifecycle templates 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. Quarterly OKR and KPI setting. Tool procurement decisions across the marketing stack. Hiring screens for content roles when we scale. Reporting cadence to the founding team.
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 prototype became the company.
Set the AEO direction at Makko before most teams treated it as a category. Schema tuned for AI extraction, content shaped for direct-answer formats, citation surfaces tracked alongside SERP positions. Goal is to lead the charge on AI citations rather than chase them later.
Owned the launch end-to-end: press outreach, founder email campaigns, paid directory placements, platform-wide distribution coordinated across six channels simultaneously. Built the launch playbook before launch day so the team executed 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 coordinated with the content calendar, social distribution, and email lifecycle so the news event lands as a multi-channel moment.
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. Documented playbooks, weekly WRAP system, async review. The team ships reliably while I focus on direction.
Cluster mapping, intent classification, and keyword target criteria for every article that ships. Documented in the SEO and AEO Master Playbook so the next article is cheaper to ship than the last one.
Subdomain blogs accrue authority separately from the main domain. With Makko at DR 12, splitting authority between two surfaces was the wrong trade. Consolidated to makko.ai/blog, redirected legacy URLs with 301s, centralized link equity on one domain.
Untracked links lose campaign attribution forever. Stood up a UTM short-link domain with a documented naming convention before publishing the first batch of cross-platform content. Every external link is attributable to campaign, channel, and content piece.
Makko AI's founding team brings senior leadership experience across Amazon, Penny Arcade, Twitch, Nintendo, and EA Games.