When the Ground Shifted, I Rebuilt.
Fall 2023. I started my doctoral program in Specialized Ministry, concentrated in SEO. May 2024, six months in, Google dropped AI Overviews at scale. The research framework I had been building was suddenly behind the curve of a landscape that was actively forming in real time.
I couldn't help myself. I started again with new research, a new thesis, new case studies, and this time I studied the field as it was forming.
I had two choices. I could wait to see how it settled. Or I could rebuild from scratch in the middle of the shift and document everything I learned.
I started running early versions of what would become The Revenue Architect Engine with multiple business owners. In October 2024, as Marketing Director at an Idaho nonprofit, I deliberately swapped the website platform to test the principles I was developing. By December 2024, the first AI Overview citations came in. I documented what held, what failed, and what the shift actually meant for founder-led businesses trying to grow without enterprise budgets.
What I built from that research became Upstream Revenue Architecture and Melanie Hoggan & Co. The methodology came from the research. The research came from somewhere older.
Why I Built This and Who I Built It For
I grew up watching my father try to get one idea to go.
He was a builder and a creator. A man with genuine vision who spent his whole life pitching the next thing. We went without lights. Without hot water. We ate oatmeal for weeks. We moved eleven times before I was thirteen, often in the middle of the night because the rent wasn't there.
He never stopped believing. And the idea never quite landed.
I have spent my entire career trying to figure out why and what could have been different if someone had shown him where the real leverage was.
The leverage was always upstream. He just never had anyone show him where upstream was.
My mother is an immigrant from Guatemala. She is a master sous chef, pastry chef, and fruit carver. She speaks with a thick accent and she is still working at 72 for less than twenty dollars an hour.
She has mastery most people will never have. She can execute on a deadline most kitchens would collapse under. She learned to do more with less before that was a business philosophy. She watched a depression-era entrepreneur squeeze every drop of juice out of what was available, and she did the same, in a country that was not hers, in a language that was not her first.
What she never had was anyone who could show her how to turn what she was worth into what she earned.
That gap, between mastery and margin, is the one I am built to close.
I do not build tools that look good in a pitch deck. I will not sell a founder a $700-a-month retainer wrapped around a $100 tool. My long-term goal is to make this work affordable, accessible, and automated for ten million business owners.
The hours founders spend in the trenches should not just equal their superpower being out in the world. The revenue margin should make the sacrifice worth it.
Founders are living in enough risk. Visibility should not be one of the places they have to wonder if it is going to work.
What I See When Founders Find Me
Most founders who find me have already tried everything the advice told them to try. More content. Another campaign. A fresh look at the offer that used to convert and somehow does not anymore. The numbers come back fine and nobody can say why the inquiries are down. By the time a founder reaches this page, they have usually blamed themselves first, then their marketing, then the economy, then they got quiet.
What I have learned from the research is that the problem is almost never the founder. The problem is that the introduction between their business and their buyer has changed. AI builds the shortlist now, before the buyer ever visits a website. I call that The Revenue Fog: what it feels like when a business is still working but is no longer being introduced.
What Ground-Floor Research Actually Means
There is a difference between someone who studied the AI shift after it became a market trend and someone who was doing the research when it happened.
I was six months into my doctoral program in Specialized Ministry, concentrated in SEO, when Google's AI Overviews launched at scale in May 2024. I was not reading about it in a newsletter. I was watching it happen in my research data in real time. Once I saw what was happening, I could not unsee it. The Citation Economy had begun, and almost nobody in founder-led business had the vocabulary for it yet.
I rebuilt my entire doctoral framework from scratch in the middle of the shift. Then I tested the principles on a real organization with a real budget, and documented everything.
In October 2024, as Marketing Director at an Idaho nonprofit, I deliberately swapped the website platform to test the SEO and AEO principles I was developing. By December 2024, the citations started coming in. We went from no mentions to regular citations and links in AI Overviews, ranking across video, images, and the Google All-page video reference position. Approximately fifteen additional business owners ran early versions of the methodology in parallel. What I learned is not what was being written about in the AEO content that started flooding the market six months later. It is what I observed firsthand, what held, what broke, what the Citation Economy actually rewards, and what most of the market is still getting wrong.
That research is the foundation of every methodology decision in The Revenue Architect Engine. It is not a trend report or a repackaged SEO playbook. It is firsthand observation from the ground floor of a transition that is still underway.
What the market is offering right now in the AEO space is largely six months old. FOMO-driven. Tool-wrapped. Sold as a complete solution to a landscape that is still actively forming.
I am not interested in selling you a snapshot. I am interested in building architecture that lasts.
Ground-floor research is not a credential. It is a different category of knowledge entirely, and it produces a different category of methodology. The methodology draws on something older than the research.
What I Did Before May 2024
I started college at sixteen. I had been training as a classical violinist and concert pianist since the age of three, the kind of training where precision is not optional and performance under pressure is just Tuesday.
That background shaped how I work with founders more than any marketing credential I have earned since. I was trained to hear the overtones beneath the note. To sense what is happening underneath the thing someone is saying. To listen at a level most people don't.
When a founder describes their business to me, I am not just taking notes. I am listening for the thing they cannot say yet, the superpower they live with so constantly it has become invisible to them.
I taught conservatory-level students for decades while directing an international strings tour group. I know what it means to hold a high standard under real conditions and build something that performs when it counts.
After the music, I spent 5 years consulting in the marketing space, 5 years monetizing influencer audiences and another 3 years serving in a Director of Marketing role, where I tested the earliest versions of what would become The Revenue Architect Engine on a real organization in real time.
The results from that work: traffic doubled in four months with no paid ads. A $750,000 capital campaign goal became $2 million raised with 93% collected in the first year. Our main conversion metric grew 20% consistently across three years.
The methodology was not theoretical. It was tested, measured, and proven before it had a name. That same precision, the same listening, is what drives every client engagement today.
Your buyers trust AI to build their shortlist before they visit any website.
The Revenue Architect Engine cannot be built without the founder in the room. That is more than a policy. It is the architecture.
Founders carry their business with them twenty-four hours a day. It is so meshed into their identity that they often lose track of what their actual superpower is, because they live with their gifts every day and they just feel normal. What feels obvious to you is not obvious to anyone else. It is your unfair advantage. And it is exactly what AI needs to cite you instead of your visibility competitor.
The intake is not a form. It is three ninety-minute recorded conversations where I go looking for what you cannot see about yourself and your business.
From those conversations, I extract the current genius, focus, and superpower of your business, unfiltered, in your voice. From that voice, everything else is built: the Question Monetization Map, the Entity Hygiene and Alignment, the anchor pages, the H-tag strategy, the content direction, the GBP optimization. Everything downstream is infused with what came out upstream.
Money moves through questions. AI builds the shortlist. Revenue flows to whoever owns the right questions. Do you know which questions are sending buyers to you?
The founder voice is not a content asset. It is the upstream architecture that everything else is built from. I do not automate the founder engagement. I work with you in the room.
Based in Skagway, Alaska. Building for Ten Million Founders.
I work from Skagway, Alaska, a tiny town in Southeast Alaska that runs on seasonal workers, cruise ships, and people who chose a life that does not fit a standard template.
My long-term goal is to make Upstream Revenue Architecture affordable, accessible, and automated for ten million business owners. I am not there yet. Right now I work with founder-led businesses directly, implementing methodology as we validate and document across verticals.
The Timeline
Trained as a classical violinist and concert pianist. Learned to hear what is underneath what is being said.
Directed an international strings tour group. Developed the precision and listening skills that now drive founder voice extraction.
Developed early versions of question-based content architecture and learned how discovery actually works at the top of the funnel. Specialized in Product-Led SEO and Search Listening.
Tested the earliest version of The Revenue Architect Engine in a real organization. Traffic doubled in four months. A $750K capital campaign goal became $2M raised. The methodology was proven before it had a name.
Six months in when everything changed.
Rebuilt the entire doctoral research framework in real time. In October 2024, deliberately swapped the website platform at an Idaho nonprofit to test the methodology. First AI Overview citations by December 2024. Approximately fifteen additional business owners ran early versions in parallel.
Working with founder-led businesses under $10M across verticals in the Citation Economy.
Not there yet. Building toward it every day.
If You Are Reading This, You Are Already Looking Upstream.
The Citation Economy rewards founders who bring forward who they already are, fully, specifically, coherently.
See The Revenue Architect Engine