Most startups don't have a marketing problem. They have a missing-machine problem.

They know they need outbound, SEO, AEO, and content. So they hire an agency. The agency hands them a strategy deck, a content calendar, and a Slack channel that goes quiet by week three. The founder is left with a plan and still no system actually running.

I watched that happen at 40+ startups before I decided to fix it.

What Griot does

We install AI agents for marketing.

AEO, SEO, content, and outbound, deployed as one system instead of a slide deck. We embed with your team, build the infrastructure inside your own stack, and hand you the keys.

A few of the agents we put live:

Outbound. Every day it scans the most-followed profiles in your space, pulls who engaged, scores them against your ICP, sends a cold DM with your offer, works the replies, and books the meeting. One version we ran produced 42 positive responses in two weeks. No SDR.

SEO / AEO. It treats your search presence like a deploy pipeline: crawls the site, reads Search Console, reads your codebase, finds the pages quietly blocked from Google, writes the fix, and pings your Slack. Continuously, not once a quarter. (We ran this for two clients and found a site with zero indexable pages. It looked perfectly fine from the outside.)

Paid creative. It researches real customer pain points, writes the scripts, generates the creative, ships it through the ad platform's API, and manages the account off live data. One took a cost-per-lead from $17 to $3 in a single weekend.

These aren't prototypes. They're systems I'd already built and run before Griot existed.

Where they came from

I learned the core move at Origami: take a manual, human process and hand it to a machine that never sleeps. I started by automating my own job there and ended up running growth and SEO.

Then I tested it as a business at Northlight, shipping SEO monitoring, outbound, and analytics pipelines as live systems instead of recommendations.

Then I did it for 40+ more: Instafleet, Bubble Gum BI, Spec Funnel, and dozens of others. Different industries, different ICPs, the same exact gap every time. (Spec Funnel's first paid pilot came from a cold LinkedIn message to Haskell, a $3 billion contractor. Cold DM to paid pilot, no salesperson in the loop.)

Forty companies in, the lesson was obvious. Almost every startup is missing the same machine, and almost nobody is shipping it for them.

Why now

Five years ago, "a custom AI agent that runs your outbound" was a six-figure engineering project. Today it's a Claude Code subscription, a VPS, and someone who has made the move enough times to know where the wires go.

The gap between a startup with its growth engine installed and one without is about to become the difference between the companies that make it and the ones that don't. Right now, almost nobody has it installed.

That's what we're here to fix.

Your startup deserves a growth engine, not a slide deck. If that's the thing you've been missing, let's talk :)

Austin