A few things I'm building, online and out in the world.
I never went to college. I started building on the internet at 16 and kept going.
What began with niche websites turned into a career in SEO, then software, and eventually businesses of my own. Along the way, I’ve written for millions of readers, helped grow acquired websites, led teams, and built my first SaaS.
Each stage built on the last. Running websites introduced me to search. Working with publishers and investment teams taught me how online businesses operate at scale. Building tools for those businesses brought me into software and AI.
I built niche websites that grew to 500K+ monthly visitors, learning SEO by working on projects of my own.
Those sites were my testing ground. I researched what people searched for, created content around their questions, and watched how changes affected traffic. I could experiment, see the results, and use what I learned to improve the next page or website.
I got hooked on building something from scratch and figuring out why it worked.
I took what I’d learned from my own websites and started doing SEO for other businesses. I earned $34K freelancing on 
Upwork and worked with a VC-backed San Francisco startup.
Client work brought new responsibilities: understanding someone else’s business, explaining my recommendations, and delivering work they could depend on. The results from my own projects helped me earn those opportunities.
The internet had become both a place to learn and a way to make a living, connecting me with people and businesses far beyond where I grew up.
After school, I skipped college and went full-time into SEO.
I already had websites I’d grown, clients I’d worked with, and income from skills I’d taught myself. I wanted to keep building on that experience and see how far I could take it.
My education continued through the work itself: taking on unfamiliar projects, making decisions, and being responsible for the results. Each project gave me more experience and opened up the next opportunity.
I wrote for major tech publications, producing 120+ articles that went on to generate 8M+ views.
The work involved researching technical subjects, understanding the questions readers had, and turning that information into something clear and useful. It gave me experience with the editorial work behind the pages I’d spent years trying to rank.
Writing at that scale deepened my understanding of content, from choosing the right angle to explaining something well enough that a reader could actually use it. That experience still shapes how I approach search and communicate ideas.
At BlackBook Investments, I helped deploy $2.5M into website acquisitions, contributing to decisions about which businesses to buy and working on their growth afterward.
I was looking at websites as investments: assessing their potential, identifying opportunities, and using SEO to help grow them. It connected the work I knew with decisions about capital, revenue, and business performance.
My responsibilities also expanded into leading a 25+ person team across 30+ websites. Managing work across a portfolio meant setting priorities, coordinating people, and building processes that could support multiple sites at once.
I managed SEO for 
MakeUseOf and 
How-To Geek, working on publications reaching 5M+ visitors a day.
With large content libraries and established editorial teams, there was always more that could be improved than could be tackled at once. A big part of the job was deciding where to focus, which changes mattered most, and how to coordinate the work.
This stage brought together my experience in search, content, and team leadership. It also made me increasingly interested in the tools and systems that could help teams work more effectively.
I started building 
WordPress plugins, SEO tools, and AI automations, including tools for internal linking and content workflows.
The ideas came from problems I kept encountering in my own work. Years inside SEO operations had given me a close view of the research, repetitive tasks, and manual processes that took up people’s time.
Building software gave me a way to improve those workflows. I could take a process I understood, turn parts of it into a tool, and refine it through use. That became the connection between my background in SEO and the products I wanted to build.
I built Mentions.so, an AI visibility platform that helped brands understand how they appeared across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and other AI platforms.
The product brought together search, analytics, and software. We were helping businesses answer a new set of questions about where they appeared in AI answers and how their visibility compared with competitors.
Mentions reached $20K in monthly recurring revenue within 24 hours of launch.
My work extended across product decisions, pricing, onboarding, customer support, and agency relationships. I was involved in the conversations and day-to-day problems that helped shape what we built next.
Today, I’m the co-founder and Head of Strategy at 
Known, working on SEO and AI search optimization. I bring together research, data, content, and technical strategy, with a focus on connecting our work to business results. I also build the tools and processes that help our team deliver.
I’m also co-founding 
Tobias, an AI employee for Slack and Microsoft Teams. It builds on the same interest that first drew me into automation: understanding how work gets done and finding useful ways for software to take it on.
Alongside that, I founded 
Flashback Photobooth in India. Building a physical business has introduced a different set of responsibilities, from locations and customer experiences to staffing and day-to-day operations.
Across these businesses, I’m still drawn to the process that got me started at 16: building something, understanding how people use it, and figuring out how to make it better.
Known Tobias Flashback I share more experiments, research, and things I’m building on LinkedIn.
Away from the screen, I enjoy listening to music and occasionally picking up a sketchbook.
Got an idea, project, or just want to connect? Send me an email via the form below. I’d love to hear from you.
Known
Tobias
Flashback