About
I test the AI marketing stack so you don’t have to.
I’m Paul Saunders — the operator’s translator for the AI marketing stack. I run a one-person practice for owners who already do paid marketing and are quietly drowning in the monthly churn of AI, with no single person whose job it is to tell them what actually matters. That’s the job I’ve given myself.
If you run a business that already advertises, you don't have an information shortage — you have the opposite. Ads, content, design, search, infrastructure: every lane now ships AI changes faster than you can read about them, let alone act. The advice is fragmented across a hundred tabs and never adds up to a plan. You end up either chasing every shiny tool or freezing and ignoring all of them — and both cost you. What you actually want is boring and rare: one trusted person with one holistic view, who tells you plainly what matters this month, what to ignore, and what to do next. Not a Google Ads guy. Not a content guy. One guide for the whole stack.
I test what ships. When a new model, ad capability or search behaviour lands, I run it through real work — not a demo — the week it arrives. Most of it I throw out. The small amount that's genuinely useful, I fold into how I operate and write up plainly so you can act on it without becoming an expert yourself. In a normal week I'm across the full stack: Google Ads, Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO — making your site readable and recommendable by AI assistants like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity), agentic-shopping readiness (getting product catalogues ready for the AI shopping agents that buy on a customer's behalf), content, video, and the infrastructure that ties it together. Google Ads is the foundation I came up through — fifteen-plus years of it — but it's one skill in the suite now, not the headline.
I call the method behind it the Calm Stack Method: one view of the whole stack, a short list of what to do this month, and a clear list of what to ignore. See the method →
I run this solo, with AI agents I’ve built and tuned to do the heavy lifting — research, audits, drafts, reports, builds — under my direction and judgement.
No account managers, no junior pool, no agency layer between you and the person doing the work. That isn’t a limitation I’m apologising for; it’s the argument. I think an AI-leveraged operator can now outpace the old agency model — and rather than claim it, I’d sooner you see it in how I work.
I don’t ask you to trust me on a sales call. I give the work away first. The playbooks, cheat sheets and guides on this site are built from the method I use myself, published openly so you can read them, use them, and get value before we ever speak. The free knowledge is the front door; you self-select into working with me only when the work genuinely warrants it. If the playbooks are enough for you, brilliant — that’s a win.
I also build
MenuLingo is a SaaS product I designed, built and run — live since early 2026 — through my own Business Factory pipeline, the process I’m developing to take an idea from concept to a working product. I mention it not as a trophy but as evidence: I’m not theorising about shipping with AI. I do it.
- 01Founder and principal of a boutique marketing practice, trading as Smash It Marketing.
- 02Sole director of Retro River Pty Ltd — the legal and invoicing layer behind the practice and the products. The person you work with is me.
- 03Fifteen-plus years in Google Ads and digital marketing, now reoriented around an AI-first way of operating.
- 04Completed three of Anthropic's training courses — the reading behind the building, not a badge collection.
- 05Works daily across Claude Code, Google Ads, AEO, Shopify and agentic-commerce readiness, video, and the Vercel infrastructure underneath.
When you bring me in, the work is productised: fixed-scope services with transparent pricing, so you know what you’re getting and what it costs before you commit. See how we’d work together →
Start with the free playbooks.
Take what’s useful, act on it today. When the weekly churn stops being something you want to manage yourself, that’s when one trusted guide for the whole stack earns its keep. Let’s talk.