Builder. Author.
Category Creator.

Starting with code

Before there was an agency, there was a developer. My background is in mobile application development. I built apps, shipped products, and learned through the process that technical skills are only as valuable as the judgment you wrap around them. A working app that no one finds, or that solves the wrong problem, is not a win.

FlashStarts and the accelerator years

I was accepted into FlashStarts, a Pittsburgh-based startup accelerator, as a technical co-founder. That experience was formative in a specific way: it taught me to think about distribution before product, about how businesses actually get discovered and validated. The question of how a business gets found online became something I took seriously at a structural level, not just a tactical one.

The pivot into AI SEO

I started paying close attention to AI search before most people in the SEO industry were talking about it as a separate discipline. The signals were there if you were watching: the way large language models were beginning to handle information retrieval, the shift in how Google was integrating generative features, the early behavior of tools like Perplexity and ChatGPT when answering commercial queries.

I did not wait for consensus. I started building frameworks for understanding AI citation behavior, auditing client sites for AI readability, and testing what actually moved the needle. That research became the infrastructure behind Digital Fire Creative and, eventually, the foundation of the book.

Building Digital Fire Creative

Digital Fire Creative is an AI SEO and Generative Engine Optimization agency. The agency runs proprietary AI visibility audits on local businesses across Pittsburgh North, generating a longitudinal dataset that makes every future audit smarter. Google AI Overviews now cite the agency by name. That is not an accident.

We operate out of Innovation Works at the Global Technology Center in Warrendale, Pennsylvania. Pittsburgh has always been a place where serious technical work gets done, and that ethos fits how we operate.

The honest version

This is a space where the landscape shifts regularly. No one has all the answers, and anyone who claims otherwise is selling something. What I have is a track record of building in the space, a set of frameworks that hold up under real conditions, and a commitment to sharing what I actually know rather than what sounds good in a pitch.