Your work is
world-class.
Finding you
shouldn't be hard.
I did the homework before we met. I searched for you the way your buyers search. I read your site the way a first-time visitor reads it. I looked at your competitors, your search landscape, and what's happening to your category at a macro level. What I found changed my diagnosis completely. This isn't a brand clarity problem — you know exactly who you are. This is a brand experience problem. And that's a very different, very solvable thing.
You're winning
where you thought
you were losing.
When someone types "Houston's graphic recorder" into Google, you win completely. Google's AI names you first. Your organic ranking is strong. Your 20-year domain is doing exactly what it should. Your SEO is not broken.
So why did traffic drop in 2024? That was my first question. And the answer isn't what either of us expected.
A competitor only pays to run ads against a specific search term when they believe it converts. They're spending money on your warm leads because they consider you worth beating. That's not a sign of weakness — it's a signal of your value. But it's costing you bookings you've already earned.
A $6 billion industry
borrowed your vocabulary.
Mid-2024.
This is the thing I don't think anyone has told you — and it's the most important context in this document.
In mid-2024, Google rolled out AI Overviews at scale. Simultaneously, a wave of AI meeting tools — Fireflies, Otter, Fathom, Zoom AI Companion — exploded into mainstream adoption. These tools are marketed to knowledge workers as "AI notetakers," "meeting recorders," "voice recorders" — and "graphic recorders." When millions of people suddenly search "graphic recorder" to find meeting software, they flood your category with entirely different intent.
The rising search volume you see for "graphic recorder" is not rising demand for your service. It is rising demand for software that borrowed your name. Google Trends confirms it — the related searches are "audio recorder," "voice recorder," "screen recorder." Not event planning searches. Software searches.
Here's the inversion worth holding: when a buyer searches "graphic recorder" and gets Fireflies results, they quickly realize software isn't what they need for their leadership summit. They search again — with more specificity. That second search is the highest-intent buyer in your market. They've already disqualified the alternative. The brand experience question is: are you there when they arrive, and do they feel your quality immediately?
The content exists.
The credibility exists.
The experience doesn't.
I want to be precise here — because my first version of this brief got it wrong. I said your site doesn't answer your buyer's three questions. That's not true. I looked more carefully.
Your site has Pricing under About. FAQs under About. Speaking credentials under About. Work samples under Projects. Seven services in one dropdown. Eight items in the Projects menu. The content is all there. But the navigation is organized around what you do — not around what your buyer needs to decide.
A buyer who arrives with three questions has to excavate two or three separate menus to find the answers. Most don't. They leave before they feel how good you are.
This is actually good news. You don't need to create new content. You need to reorganize what exists around buyer intent — and make the experience of encountering you feel as exceptional as the work you do.
Six moments where
the experience
breaks.
A brand experience is the sum of every moment a buyer encounters you — before, during, and after the decision. Here are the six moments where yours creates friction instead of confidence.
Same process I used
for Houston Exponential.
Proven. Repeatable.
I recently completed a brand experience strategy engagement for Houston Exponential — the organization behind H-Town Roundup, the same event where we first connected. The process produced three distinct experience concepts, each making a different strategic bet about how HX should feel when you encounter it. The client's response: "Obsessed with the way this is making me feel."
I want to run the same process for Alphachimp. Here's how it works.
Each concept is built as a fully interactive experience — not a static PDF. You open it on any device and feel the direction, not just read about it. Your ranking of the three tells me more about what Alphachimp should become than any discovery question could.
Nothing gets built until direction is confirmed. Nothing gets proposed until we've talked.
Five questions.
No small talk.
Each one closes a gap the research can't close. I'll be listening for the specific words you use — those words become the brief.
Right now the answer is: not quickly enough. The gap is real — 25 years, Northwestern, World Bank, SXSW, Houston's innovation ecosystem. But the experience of encountering your brand doesn't yet communicate that gap. The content is there. The credibility is there. The work is extraordinary.
The experience just needs to catch up to the reality of what you've built. That's the work. And it's exactly the kind of work I do.