I'm a marketer, and I have been one since 2006, when I started a marketing degree at AUT at seventeen and a lawn round two years later, paying for ten thousand flyers at a time and watching which colour got the phone ringing. The degree took until 2019 to finish, because in between I built a book printing company, BookPrint, ran it from 2012, sold it in 2020 and moved to Wānaka.
The tent. At nineteen I had a plan without knowing it had a name. Paul made tents so he could preach for free, and churches still call it tentmaking: you hold down a paying job so nobody has to pay you for the other thing. I work part of the week for two companies, a manufacturer and a financial services business, on separate days, and that pays for the house and the time.
The writing is the other thing, and it's free. Free has never meant unpaid. It means you're not the one paying. When I first put my framework online I said it plainly: no paid courses, workshops, masterclasses, webinars, ebooks or funnels, and I turn down most consulting and contract work. Capsule setups are the exception: I'm a Capsule partner, and working with Capsule has its own page. There's a book that costs money, and there are affiliate links on these pages that pay me a commission if you buy through them, and every one of them says so where it sits.
Three schools made me. Corporate business from my father, who bought a printing company out of somebody else's garage; a faith-led hustle from church, smash it out, bleeding eyes; and evidence from university, which taught me the five whys and the classical theory I still reach for and still credit. I'm moving from digital marketer to marketer, more product, more management, more of the long game, and I'm writing this while I'm still in the trade, not after I've left it.
Why you'd give me a few minutes. I still do the job I write about, every week, with other people's money in the accounts I check, so when I'm wrong I find out in my own work first, before it reaches you. I'm not a guru and I don't have a following to protect. I build things, watch what happens, and write down what I learn.
What I'm building. Four framework sites, a book, and an experiment to find out whether any of it still works in 2026. The book is the long version. The experiment is me testing my own trade on myself, out loud. Start wherever you're most overwhelmed.
- Traffic + Offer: put a little traffic in front of an offer before you build anything, and let real people tell you whether the business works.
- Opportunity + Authority: how search decides who gets found, and what to do on your website now.
- 4 Quadrant AI: you're being handed AI tasks and losing grip on your systems, your brand and your creative work, so decide which work you keep and which you hand over.
- The Trust Algorithm: how trust gets decided, by people and now by machines, before you chase search, reviews or followers.
The book is Marketing Curious: Working the Noise. The experiment is where you watch whether any of it works, and one page sorts the four sites by what's overwhelming you.