About Optimist: 10 Years Building Organic Growth Engines for B2B Tech & SaaS

Optimist is an SEO & AEO consultancy for B2B tech and SaaS companies.

We build organic growth engines startups need to grow from Series A to IPO.

We help marketing leaders navigate the shifting SEO and AI search landscape — and have driven up to 14x inbound results for clients like Glide and Stampli.

We exist for teams facing uncomfortable but urgent questions:

  • Why is organic traffic down?

  • Why is content output high but pipeline impact unclear?

  • Why are buying journeys harder to influence?

  • How does AI change discovery, evaluation, and trust?

  • What replaces the old SEO playbook?

We help answer those questions — then build and execute the strategy that follows.

Optimist is a consulting firm that designs organic growth engines around modern buyer behavior, integrated AEO and SEO visibility, and commercial outcomes — and equips your team to run them.

The Landscape Has Changed

B2B content marketing is undergoing structural shifts:

  • Search behavior is moving from traditional SEO to SEO + GEO — integrated visibility across search engines and generative AI systems.

  • Buyers self-educate more deeply before engaging sales.

  • Content saturation has reduced the marginal impact of volume-based strategies.

  • Marketing teams are under pressure to prove pipeline contribution.

Old playbooks optimized for rankings and output are no longer sufficient.

Marketing leaders now need an integrated engine — one system designed to win across search engines and AI answers simultaneously.

That’s what The Complete Organic Revenue Engine (CORE) Framework is built for, and it’s how we work at Optimist.

What We Do

Optimist partners with marketing and revenue leaders at Series A B2B tech and SaaS companies to:

  • Diagnose the gap between your current organic visibility and what your category demands — across AI answers and traditional search

  • Design the integrated AEO + SEO + content engine through the CORE Framework

  • Equip your team with the briefs, frameworks, and measurement scaffolding to ship the work

  • Steer the engine as it runs — adjusting strategy as the market and the models shift

Our engagements span strategy, advisory, and consulting, with a single goal:

Make organic the most predictable engine for pipeline and revenue in your stack.

Strategy & Advisory

We help leadership teams:

  • Evolve content strategies from SEO focus to GEO/AEO and AI visibility

  • Map real buyer journeys and influence points

  • Define audience, narrative, and messaging architecture

  • Establish measurement models tied to pipeline and revenue

  • Prioritize investments across channels, formats, and initiatives

  • Align content strategy with GTM, sales, and product motions

This work results in clear plans, documented frameworks, and executive alignment — not just recommendations.

Execution & Enablement

Strategy only matters if it ships.

We partner with internal teams to:

  • Build content operations, workflows, and governance your team can run

  • Equip your writers, designers, and marketers with the briefs, frameworks, and standards that turn strategy into shipped work

  • Implement the analytics and reporting that tie organic activity to pipeline and revenue

  • Train and enable your internal team for sustained velocity — and when execution capacity is the gap, we refer to partners we trust for done-for-you production

How We Work

Our process plugs into your existing team, complements your workflows, and aligns to your stakeholders at every step of the engagement.

Here’s what to expect when working with Optimist:

  1. Strategic Discovery: We learn about the business, your goals, your needs, and how we can serve your team best.
  2. Workflow Architecture: We advise on how the work flows through your team. Hand-offs, approvals, CMS, measurement.
  3. Tight Alignment: We work together—literally. Shared Slack channels, account access, and deep integration with your team is how we stay aligned, in sync, and on target. We even work directly with your internal stakeholders and SMEs to build deep brand expertise.
  4. Steer & Iterate: Maximum accountability, minimum micromanagement. We stay close as your team executes — measuring, advising, adjusting. We report back on pipeline impact and stay plugged into the shifts happening in your business and your category. We don’t take the keyboard. We make sure your team keeps shipping at the level the strategy demands.

Our Services

Every Optimist engagement starts with a free Organic Revenue Opportunity Report that quantifies the addressable organic pipeline in your category and where it’s flowing today.

From there, the path forks based on how deep you want us in the work — from a one-time engagement that leaves your team with the full plan to an ongoing relationship where we’re in the room steering the engine alongside you.

1 · Organic Revenue Opportunity Report — Free

A custom two-page diagnostic of how much organic revenue is contestable in your category and which named competitors are capturing it today.

Includes:

  • Five-model AI-visibility benchmark
  • Topic-cluster heatmap
  • Verbatim AI excerpts showing exactly where buyers are getting recommendations
  • 24-month projection of what’s at stake if nothing changes.

Right for: Founders, CMOs, and heads of growth at Series A B2B tech and SaaS asking “is there a meaningful opportunity here?” before committing budget or building a plan.

Get your free Organic Revenue Opportunity Report.

2 · CORE Roadmap — One-time engagement

The full paid diagnostic and prioritized plan.

Optimist’s complete analysis of your entity clarity, content coverage, and AI visibility across the five major models — paired with the sized keyword universe and the CORE Roadmap your team executes against.

The engagement closes with a 90-minute walkthrough where we recommend the right ongoing engagement (or none, if your team can run the Roadmap on its own).

Right for: Teams that have validated the opportunity and need the prioritized plan to act on it.

Built to be self-sufficient — your team can execute the Roadmap without us once it ships.

3 · CORE Advisory — Monthly engagement

After the Roadmap ships, we stay on the wall.

Monthly visibility tracking, interpretation, and roadmap maintenance — tracking AI mentions, citation patterns, and pipeline signals so your team always knows where the engine is on-target and where it needs adjustment.

We don’t take the keyboard; we name the next move and stay close while your team makes it.

Right for: Teams executing the Roadmap who want a expert on deck to answer questions, watch the dashboard and steer decisionmaking. (Available only after a CORE Roadmap.)

CORE Principal — Active strategist

We’re in the room.

Monthly planning, weekly check-ins, and direct strategic involvement across content, AEO, and SEO — the full CORE methodology applied to your engine end-to-end.

Optimist shapes the briefs, steers the Roadmap, and adjusts as the market and the models shift.

Right for: Companies where the organic engine is a major lever and execution velocity matters.

We provide hands-on help to accelerate your growth trajectory. (Available only after a CORE Roadmap.)

Our Clients

We partner with Series A B2B tech and SaaS companies that:

  • Are under pressure to prove marketing’s pipeline contribution

  • See declining returns from legacy SEO or content volume strategies

  • Need to adapt to AI-driven discovery and evaluation

  • Want strategic partnership — not vendor output

Optimist clients include growth-stage and enterprise brands in fintech, retail tech, HR tech, health tech, and beyond. We believe content should be the core of marketing and GTM strategies. That’s why we build proprietary frameworks, benchmark reports, and data-driven content assets that help brands stand out, establish authority, and drive measurable results.

Our Experience &  Case Studies

From Series A startups designing their organic engine fresh to enterprise leaders scaling globally, Optimist specializes in helping B2B technology and software companies build pipeline through integrated AEO and SEO.

We have demonstrated and a strong track record with companies in a wide range of industries and verticals:

  • Fintech and financial services
  • HR and benefits tech
  • Healthcare and health tech
  • Retail tech and ecommerce
  • Business and financial automation software
  • Developer tools, SDKs, and web hosting
  • Marketing and sales technology

Optimist has a deep track record (nearly 10 years) of proven expertise scaling content creation, driving growth in traffic and conversions, and generating massive ROI.

Some highlights from our client work:

  • HelloSign: Scaled organic traffic by 1,300%, leading up to acquisition by Dropbox (Read case study)
  • DreamHost: Built a content engine to scale production and support 100+ new assets per month across their blog (6 languages) and 7 social channels (Read case study)
  • Stampli: 10x page-1 SEO rankings, 2,000% increase in organic traffic value, 400% lift in MQLs and conversions (Read case study)
  • Glide: 12x traffic growth and 14x leads attributed to content (Read case study)
  • Kubera: 2,961% increase in organic traffic, 4,200% increase in product sign ups (Read case study)
  • Plytix: 757% increase in traffic and MQLs; content #1 driver of leads and pipeline (Read case study)
  • Pixelcut: 43X blog traffic growth in just 9 months

Read all of our case studies for more success stories.

The Optimist Team

Optimist was founded in 2016 by Tyler Hakes.

Tyler is a 20-year veteran of content marketing and organic growth — with a background in consulting, technology startups, and B2B software. He works directly with every Optimist engagement.

Learn more about Tyler.

For done-for-you execution, we refer clients to our trusted partners.

Optimist has a network of freelance strategists, operators, and creators who’ve been in the trenches building growth engines for some of the fastest-growing and most influential B2B companies in the world.

We also built one of the world’s largest communities of content marketers (5,000+ members) because we don’t just practice this craft—we lead it.

Meet the full Optimist team.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does Optimist do?

Optimist is a full-service SEO & AEO agency that helps B2B marketing leaders increase organic visibility and drive more inbound pipeline.

We provide consulting, advisory, and consulting to redesign strategy, rebuild content operations, and implement systems that perform in modern buyer and discovery environments.

What problems does Optimist solve?

We help marketing teams solve challenges such as:

  • Declining organic traffic or lead flow

  • Unclear pipeline contribution from content

  • Content teams producing high volume with low impact

  • Shifts in buyer behavior and self-education

  • Adapting strategy for AI-driven discovery

  • Replacing outdated SEO-only playbooks

Our work focuses on resetting strategy and rebuilding execution around revenue impact.

What is the shift from SEO to SEO + AEO?

Traditional SEO focuses on visibility in search engine results.

Modern discovery now also happens inside generative AI systems (such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and AI-powered search experiences).

SEO + AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) or GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) means designing content and digital presence to be visible and influential across:

  • Traditional search engines

  • AI-generated answers

  • AI-assisted research and evaluation flows

Optimist helps teams integrate both into a unified organic visibility and inbound strategy.

How does Optimist approach content strategy differently from other content agencies?

We start with business outcomes and buyer behavior, not content calendars.

Our approach:

  • Diagnoses what is misaligned

  • Redesigns strategy around real buying journeys

  • Aligns content to pipeline influence points

  • Builds operational systems to execute consistently

  • Implements measurement tied to revenue outcomes

This ensures content strategy is a commercial system, not a publishing exercise.

Does Optimist only work on strategy, or do you execute too?

Strategy and advising — your team owns execution.

We architect the organic engine through the Complete Organic Revenue Engine (CORE) Framework, equip your team with the briefs and frameworks to ship the work, and stay close as the engine runs.

For done-for-you content production, we refer to partners we trust.

Who does Optimist work with?

We partner with Series A B2B tech and SaaS companies — vertical-agnostic — on the trajectory toward IPO or acquisition.

Past clients include growth-stage and enterprise brands across fintech, retail tech, HR tech, health tech, and dev tools.

How do you measure success?

Success is measured through:

  • Pipeline contribution

  • Lead quality improvements

  • Buying journey influence

  • Revenue acceleration

  • Operational efficiency gains

We prioritize business metrics over content output metrics.

How does Optimist support internal teams?

We embed alongside internal teams to:

  • Design workflows and governance

  • Provide execution support

  • Implement analytics systems

  • Transfer knowledge and capability

Our goal is to leave teams stronger, faster, and more self-sufficient.

Is Optimist focused on AI in marketing?

Yes — specifically how AI changes:

  • Buyer discovery

  • Content visibility

  • Evaluation behavior

  • Measurement models

We help teams adapt strategy and operations to perform in AI-mediated discovery environments, without chasing trends or gimmicks.

How is Optimist different from traditional agencies?

Traditional agencies focus on:

  • Producing content

  • Managing editorial calendars

  • Reporting engagement metrics

Optimist focuses on:

  • Solving strategic misalignment

  • Designing revenue-linked systems

  • Embedding execution

  • Delivering commercial outcomes

We act as strategic operators, not external production vendors.

What types of deliverables does Optimist provide?

Deliverables typically include:

  • Content and buyer journey strategy

  • Messaging and narrative architecture

  • Operating models and workflows

  • Measurement frameworks tied to pipeline

  • Execution plans and roadmaps

  • Enablement materials for internal teams

Deliverables are designed for immediate operational use.

How long do engagements last with Optimist?

Engagements vary, but most range from:

  • Short diagnostic and reset engagements (4–8 weeks)

  • Multi-phase transformation programs (3–9 months)

  • Ongoing advisory and execution partnerships

Scope depends on team maturity and transformation needs.