Nineteen years of turning data into performance. This is how it became three companies.

I’ve been doing SEO since 2007. First for my own businesses, then for clients around the world, and now across three projects that all come back to the same problem: the distance between the raw data a business already has and the performance it’s actually capable of.

This page is the long version of how that happened, including the parts that didn’t work.

Why any of this matters to you

If you’re considering working with Rankmax, this is the long answer to a fair question: who’s behind it, and have they actually done this before. If you’re here to learn SEO, most of what I know came from getting it wrong on my own money first. Both of those are below, in order.

How I found SEO

My start in digital marketing was 2007. I was 16 and looking for a bigger challenge than boxing pizzas at my local Domino’s.

With a bit of luck, timing and persistence, I landed a job as an ecommerce databaser. Somewhere between spreadsheets, I taught myself HTML by trying to fix the things I’d broken.

Then one day my boss asked if I could do something to get the website showing up more on Google. That was the start of it.

Finding my feet

I was average to below average at most subjects at school. The one A I pulled off in senior high was for building a basic HTML website in computer studies.

I completely cheated it. I downloaded a pirated copy of Adobe Dreamweaver, adjusted a template, and handed that in instead of hand-coding the thing.

Even then I was looking for the shortcut that got the biggest result.

I loved the process enough to enrol in a web design degree anyway. Not the cheating part. The part where a website comes together.

My first SEO-driven business

By 2011 I’d found WordPress and fallen for it hard enough to start a blog as a side project.

Word spread, and businesses started approaching me for work. One client became two, then three, then four.

Before long I was spending more time building websites for clients than studying for the degree that was meant to teach me how. So I dropped out, much to my parents’ dismay, and went full-time.

Building the agency, and leaving it

The freelancing grew until I needed extra hands, and the extra hands turned it into an agency. We built it into a multiple six-figure web design and SEO business over eight and a half years.

Then COVID took more than 80% of it, almost overnight.

I rebuilt it over the following year and hit my best revenue year ever. Then I burnt out completely. The kind where you wake up and feel nothing about the thing you built.

I sold my stake in 2021. For the first time in fourteen years I had no clients and no staff.

The messy middle

What followed wasn’t a clean second act.

I tried affiliate marketing and Google took that apart in 2022. I freelanced for a while. In 2023 I moved to Bali after a big life change and launched Rankmax as a SaaS product.

One month later, Google’s Helpful Content Update started burying low-quality AI-scaled content. I could have chased growth anyway. Instead I shut the SaaS down and built a boutique agency around a small number of clients whose outcomes I could personally own.

That decision has since produced over $26M in AI SEO revenue for our clients.

What I’m building now

Rankmax is three projects that share one belief: the gap between raw data and real performance is where the entire advantage lives.

Rankmax Agency is managed AI SEO for mid-market companies, and what those clients are really buying is accountability. Someone owns the organic outcome and answers for it every month. Most of them have no in-house SEO and no plans to build one, which is exactly why the agency is worth paying for.

Rankmax Agent is an AI agent I’m building to clear the SEO work that never gets done. Every team I’ve run has had a backlog full of work that would genuinely move the numbers and never gets reached. The agent exists to clear it. It’s a performance multiplier for a skilled operator, and it’s still in build. You can follow along at rankmax.ai.

Rankmax Racing is my passion project and what I get up to outside of work, where I share what I’m learning on my own track day journey. Part riding log, part life journal.

The through line is signal. Telemetry from a bike and feedback from an agent are the same problem in different clothes: an enormous amount of raw data, and a narrow, difficult path from it to real performance. I’ve spent nineteen years walking that path in search, and I’m nowhere near finished.