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What I Do:
Product-driven full-stack development meets growth-focused marketing.
I work on both software development and growth marketing projects. Those might sound quite different but they overlap heavily for many quickly growing companies.
Common Projects:
Full-stack Rails development
- Full feature development
- New & existing Rails apps
- Product-focused strategy
Growth-engineering
- Focused engineering support for growth and marketing team initiatives.
- Deep experience with SEO, analytics, CRO, content/editorial, PR, brand, and paid media.
UI & Design
- Front-end rebuilds & redesigns
- Tailwind & ViewComponent conversions
AI-focused projects
- Deep LLM integrations
- Vector/embeddings, clustering, & search
- Prompt engineering, structured output, and
Low-code & automation projects
- Extensive Zapier, Make.com, and n8n builds
- Integration with Airtable, Slack, Notion, etc.
Data-scraping & analysis
- Large-scale data gathering, scraping billions of pages and records.
- Large-scale data analysis, analyzing millions of data points to generate content and internal insights.
Engagement Types:
Ongoing Fractional Work
For teams looking for a fractional (part-time) team member, I’m happy to embed directly with the team for longer-term engagements.
These typically look like a monthly retainer structure, with a preset hours target each month, eg averaging 10-20 hours per week.
Example Structure:
40 hours per month at $6,000. Weekly meetings with team, working directly in client’s project management & team communications.
Project-Based Work
When a project has a clear target like a SaaS MVP (minimum viable product), we can often work on a fixed budget and timeframe, and then identify a longer term engagement sized depending on the features and support needed going forward.
Example Structure:
MVP app build at $12,000 per month for 1-2 months, followed by support retainer at $3,000 per month covering additional features and ongoing app upgrades and maintenance.
Note: these examples are just that—examples.
Some projects are inherently quick and some are inherently time-sucking. In most cases I can give you a rough scope after an initial call, eg “this is going to take 3-4 weeks to build core functionality and then we’ll have enough time to tackle most of your remaining feature requests in month 2.”
I can also usually highlight where the uncertainties and time sucks are going to show up. Many times we can simplify scope to get rid of vague or optional features, build the core product you want to build, and avoid. One of the mistakes I made building my first SaaS was focusing on the end product I wanted to build, instead of the 2-4 incremental products I could have launched faster to generate revenue and marketing opportunities as I built up towards the end product.
I can also help with estimating ongoing operating costs – sometimes that is as cheap as web hosting, but scales with the complexity of the app we’re building and the dependencies we need to use.
Technology I Work With:
App Development
I primarily work on Ruby on Rails projects. Ruby code is lovely to read and maintain, and Rails continually delivers on the one-person framework promise, allowing me to be productive as a team of one and build a basic app within a day, or jump right in with larger teams to quickly deliver initial projects. I typically try to keep a very vanilla Rails stack in place using Stimulus/Turbo and ViewComponents. The less exotic the dependencies, the more maintainable the app is for the long-term. Frameworks like Jumpstart Pro make it super fast and cost effective to implement features like login and authentication, Stripe billing, teams & user levels, and APIs & webhooks. It’s usually wasted energy to rebuild those features manually.
Publishing
For projects that are more publishing focused I will usually reach for platforms like WordPress and Ghost. They offer the best combination of writer/editor experience along with ease of hosting and maintenance.
Automations
For smaller implementations, especially those that might not last forever or need to be changed rapidly, it often makes more sense to work on hosted/low-code platforms like Make.com, n8n, Zapier, Airtable, Notion, Google Sheets, etc. I’ve built robust workflows on all of them and understand how to work within their billing frameworks to keep hosting costs reasonable.
Design
Tailwind is my first choice for CSS, but over the years I’ve worked on Bootstrap, PicoCSS, tons of CSS from scratch projects, and just about every WordPress theme framework out there. I typically prefer to design directly in the browser, but I’ve converted many Figma designs directly into front-end code over the years, and lived through the PSDtoHTML years, too.
AI
I’ve built extensive features and entire websites on top of LLM features from OpenAI & Anthropic, including chat & inference, vectors & embeddings, and image generation. I’m an avid user of Claude Code and Copilot, but also experienced enough to watch when they start implementing incorrect patterns and problematic solutions and guide them back to a productive solution. I like to think of these tools like a turbo button in a video game – they help you move faster but they also help you crash into walls harder if you use them 100% of the time.
Nice Things Clients & Customers Have Said Over The Years:
On my developer engagements
“If you’re looking for a Rails dev, you should hire Kane! The Rails stuff is becoming easier to do with AI, but the taste stuff and ability to figure out what to build and how it should look is still best suited for humans. Kane’s a good one and did so much for Learn To Be in such a short time!”
Neeraj, Executive Director
Learn To Be
On my marketing engagements
“One thing that’s difficult in this industry is getting people to follow through on the things they say they’re going to do. I think that’s probably the best quality of Fixture Media – I can always count on their team that 100 percent of what was said will be done.”
Conor Murphy, User Acquisition Lead
Big Fish Games
“I really like the fact that we can work so closely with the Fixture Media team. They’re a smaller shop, so it really helps to have that more personal feel. We’ve been very impressed with their entire team.”
John Hitchcock, CEO
Software Training Company
“I’ve always felt really pleased about Fixture Media’s approach and their responsiveness – they were on the ball and knew what we were doing since day one. [Within 12 months] we’ve gone from around 5,000 visitors per day to upwards of 90,000 per day from organic search.”
Alex, Co-Founder
PBH Network
On my product, Content Harmony
“With Content Harmony, everything is very intuitive, even for beginners. It’s one of the few pieces of software I’ve ever used that’s almost instantaneously valuable.”
Ken Marshall, Partner and Chief Growth Officer
RevenueZen
View Case Study
“Content Harmony gives you the freshest data and is a great place to do content briefs. It saves me time and gives me a lot more confidence that the articles we produce are going to rank well and beat the competition.”
Blair Feehan, Senior Content Marketing Manager
Rival IQ
View Case Study
“Content Harmony not only accelerated our content production, it also improved our content’s performance. With key data on any topic at our fingertips, our content team can make better decisions, optimize for search engines, and outperform the competition.”
Brendan Walsh, Principal
Mole Street
View Case Study
Want to chat more about your project?