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Case Study · KitchenSync

One operator. Six weeks. An AI-native marketing OS for a $2B restaurant platform.

Built solo with Claude Code and Cursor. Replaced HubSpot, WordPress, Webflow, Ahrefs, GA4, Intercom, and more. Zero new hires. Zero retainer SaaS. Complete autonomy.

The client

KitchenSync: restaurant back-office platform, in a growth and capital-event phase.

KitchenSync runs bookkeeping, tax, payroll, analytics, and CFO advisory for 500+ restaurants and $2B+ in revenue. Flat-rate pricing from $1,500 per location. 98% client retention.

I found them through my own lead gen. They fit my ICP perfectly — established, post-revenue, seeking a capital event, in a major growth phase. The CEO and product team were heads-down building the core product the market needs. What they didn't have was the marketing engine to match.

The original ask was for a fractional CMO to own growth, strategy, and revops for marketing. What I delivered was that — plus the entire marketing operating system, plus the front-end marketing site, plus the sales enablement. All of it, built on a proprietary stack. No HubSpot. No rented CRMs. No SaaS sprawl bleeding cash in the background.

01 — The marketing site

Persona-driven, conversion-tuned, shipped.

Seven persona landing pages, interactive pricing calculator with live industry comparison, competitor breakdowns by tool, a cluster-structured blog with E-E-A-T author signals, and adjacent-product launches. Every page is a Next.js Server Component, sub-1.5s LCP, and passing Core Web Vitals on mobile.

02 — The marketing OS

A complete marketing operating system, built in-house.

This is the part most fractional CMOs recommend buying from vendors. I built it. It runs content, landing pages, ads, analytics, SEO, AEO, link building, and an RAG-backed conversational assistant — all under one auth boundary, one data model, one roof.

Content & on-page SEO

Blog admin with Tiptap, real-time 2026-best-practice SEO scoring, topic clusters, E-E-A-T authors, social/SERP previews. Replaces WordPress, MarketMuse, and most of what Yoast does — with the SEO scoring built directly into the editing flow.

Landing pages & A/B testing← hero artifact

Clone any landing page, chat with Claude to generate variants, ship both into the A/B test engine, let traffic pick the winner. Marketing iteration loop compressed from weeks to a single afternoon.

Analytics, from scratch

First-party analytics — real-time visitors, acquisition channels, device split, conversion funnels. No GA4, no cookie banner gymnastics, no sampled data. The numbers you act on are the numbers you own.

SEO & AEO suite

Keyword tracking, AI citations monitoring, kanban content calendar, Core Web Vitals watch, alerts, competitor intelligence, link building pipeline. Replaces the Ahrefs + Moz + Semrush + MarketMuse stack that most teams pay $2,000–$5,000 a month to license.

Google Ads, managed internally

No agency retainer. A paid-to-organic bridge promotes winning keywords from paid into SEO automatically. Alerts and fallbacks keep spend inside guardrails when the market moves.

Conversational LLM with RAG

Retrieval-augmented chat trained on the company's institutional knowledge. Internal tool today, customer-facing tomorrow. The data plumbing is already in place.

03 — Retired stack

The SaaS we killed.

Every tool below was replaced by something I built in-house — owned, extensible, and purpose-fit to KitchenSync's actual workflow. No more renting capability the business could own.

WordPress
Blog CMS
cut
Webflow / Unbounce
Landing pages + A/B
cut
GA4
Analytics
cut
Ahrefs / Moz / Semrush
SEO tooling
cut
MarketMuse / Clearscope
Content scoring
cut
HubSpot
Marketing automation
cut
Intercom / Drift
Conversational AI
cut
04 — The toolchain

Same stack any serious company would pick.

Not a side-project. A production application with auth, role-based access, a typed data layer, edge deployment, and CI. The difference from a 10-engineer build isn't the stack. It's the throughput one operator achieves when AI does the typing.

Next.js 14
App framework
Neon Postgres
Database
Drizzle ORM
Type-safe queries
Vercel
Deployment
Auth.js
Authentication
Tiptap
Rich editor
Claude Code
AI pair engineer
Cursor
AI editor
What this means for you

You know you need AI. Your competitors are licensing it. I build it.

Most companies in 2026 know they need AI. Few know how to integrate it beyond a ChatGPT seat and a Zapier workflow. The gap between knowing and shipping is where the market is separating right now — and it's not about hiring more people. It's about finding an operator who ships.

If you're in that growth phase, know AI has to be part of how you go to market, and want to see what that looks like when it's actually running inside your business — let's talk.

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