Why I started RevRocket

People expect an origin story with a lightning bolt in it. Mine doesn't have one. What it has is a pattern: I notice a trajectory I don't like, and I move before somebody tells me it's my turn.

For about a decade I ran Sote Design. Websites, hosting, campaigns, podcast production, ads. Good, honest craft work. Clients were loyal. The invoices were always paid. From the outside there was no reason to change anything.

But I kept watching how people were finding businesses, and the shape of it was changing fast. That caught my attention. Here's what I noticed: a search used to hand you a page of options and let you decide which one to trust. Now people ask ChatGPT a full sentence and get a short list back — maybe three companies, maybe five, sometimes just one — assembled, summarized, and confidently delivered, with the shopping around already done for them. The businesses that make that list are the ones ChatGPT can "read" — quoted out of a website, a blog post, a white paper, a directory it trusts. If you haven't positioned your content to BE the answer, you aren't in consideration. And being absent isn't some softer outcome than losing. It's losing, quietly, to companies you never competed with.

That's the part that got me out of my chair. Not fear — I don't sell fear. Opportunity cost. The customer you never meet because you weren't findable in the place they were looking.

And you probably already feel it. Not on a report — there's no line item called "people who asked about you somewhere you weren't." You feel it because you're using these tools yourself. You ask ChatGPT something about your own industry, you read the answer, and you notice you're not in it. That's the lightbulb. Most people I talk to had that moment before they had a word for it. AEO is just the name for the thing they already suspected.

I built RevRocket with my husband, Al. We work through these things together, which means nothing below is a solo opinion — it got talked all the way through before it became how we operate. Three convictions came out of that.

Foundations before ads. Most businesses we meet still have something structurally wrong — the site, the search basics, the local listings, the schema, the plain facts about what they sell and where. Running ads on top of that is buying traffic for a building with a locked door. And the day you stop paying, the visits stop. Organic visibility keeps working. Ads are a next-year conversation, and I say so out loud even though it costs me revenue this year.

Automation is the engine, not the driver. Agentic tooling lets a small team do the work of a much larger one, and I use it aggressively. But something has to decide what matters, what is true, and what a specific business actually needs. That's still a person. Still me.

No guessing. Pricing is published. No long lock-in contracts. If a client wants to leave, they should be able to. I'd rather earn the next month than trap it.

The word that ties this to everything else in my life is agency — the capacity to choose and act for myself. I was living that long before I built a company around the word. Calling my grandparents at eighteen and asking for a ticket out of a life that wasn't heading anywhere good was agency. Bartending after a company I co-founded collapsed was agency. Building capacity when nobody was watching was agency.

I've decided more than once that this life isn't for me. What finally built the one I wanted wasn't a plan. It was taking responsibility for the choices I DID make, apologizing when I was wrong, and staying willing to understand my own thinking well enough to change it. I do that on purpose, most days, still. What more can you do?

RevRocket is what happens when you point that habit at other people's businesses.