Fusion Business

Scope boundary, stated first. Auston built the Fusion Business platform. Product direction for it was his. I ran QA and user research at his request, and I owned everything from positioning outward.

Design and creative direction for the Fusion Business website, owning visual direction and copy through daily feedback cycles with the company's designer.

Marketing. Authored and shipped 200+ content assets across the public marketing surface (positioning, website copy, social, sales collateral), plus educational thought leadership written to help readers structure their own AI governance decisions rather than to promote the product.

Cold outreach at scale. Specified the AI enrichment tool that engineering built, authored the enrichment prompt and the scoring criteria inside it, wrote the messaging, and ran a 434-contact campaign across LinkedIn and email in 6 regulated industries, alongside warm introductions through the founder's network.

The enrichment prompt opens with a hard rule against inventing client work. An agent that fabricates a case study to sound relevant burns the prospect permanently, and at outbound volume you will not find out until the damage is done.

In-person sales. Represented the company at 6+ industry events, including J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference week in San Francisco, running discovery and qualification conversations.

ICP authorship. Wrote the ideal-customer profiles for both Fusion Business and Fusion Consulting, separating the enterprise compliance buyer from the mid-market consulting buyer so the two practices stopped competing for the same message.

Internal research tooling. Auston built the news-scanning tool. I iterated on it as its daily user and the feature decisions were mine. It scans Hacker News, Reddit, independent newsletters, and regulatory sources, scores each story against a weighted taxonomy of enterprise pain points, and maps whatever clears the threshold to a specific Fusion Business angle, so the compliance argument could cite this month's breach instead of last year's.

Colorado AI insurance compliance. Built a self-contained vertical lead-generation strategy for insurers facing the SB21-169 and Regulation 10-1-1 July 2026 deadline, including a compliance guide, a website plan, a red-team assessment of my own plan, and the legal-defensibility surface built to limit E&O exposure on free educational content.

Informal outreach to approximately 3 engineering peers about open roles; no hires resulted.

The core strategic decision was in the targeting, not the publishing. The outbound model ran a two-pass filter, a broad connection pass across 6 regulated industries followed by an enrichment pass scoring each contact against the ICP before anyone was approached. The 434-contact campaign is what survived that filter.

Marketing and thought leadership ran together rather than as separate tracks. Educational articles were promoted through the same channels as product copy and hosted on the site, so a buyer could read the thinking without digging through LinkedIn.

The Colorado AI insurance strategy targeted a specific regulatory deadline (July 2026), which made it a time-boxed opportunity. Building the legal-defensibility surface into the prototype before launch addressed the E&O exposure that comes with offering free educational content on a regulated topic.

Alternative considered and rejected. Undifferentiated broad outreach without the two-pass filter. Regulated-industry buyers are slow enough to reply that noise in the list wastes the relationship capital needed to earn one.

The clearest product decisions I made here were on the tooling I used every day rather than on the platform, and I undervalued them at the time. The bigger miss was strategic. The signal I should have chased sooner was in the room, not in the pipeline. We were selling an enterprise AI platform into regulated industries, and the buyers who wanted it frequently did not have the in-house AI talent to use it. That gap was the actual business, and it became Fusion Consulting. I heard it clearly in face-to-face conversations at industry events and much less clearly through outbound, so I would weight in-person selling earlier and heavier next time. The Colorado insurance play was a sound idea overtaken by a real consulting sale, which is the right way to lose an argument.