CEO and co-founder of Kief Studio. Full-stack developer and strategist. In tech since 2012. Served as Secretary of the TRaViS board until May 2026.
https://ameliasgagne.com172 articles
A distributed async team has different tooling needs than a co-located team running daily standups. Tooling amplifies existing workflows instead of replacing them — and ignoring that is where adoption failures start.
AI is a powerful SEO tool — for research, analysis, and optimization. It's a terrible replacement for expertise, experience, and editorial judgment. Here's where we draw the line.
"This pricing expires end of quarter" and "we have other clients evaluating this" are tactics designed to compress the evaluation window on purpose. Good decisions about technology infrastructure don't respond well to artificial deadlines.
Martin Seligman's research shows resilience isn't a personality trait — it's a skill. Frontiers in Psychology's 2025 study found that founders with higher psychological capital have measurably lower burnout. This isn't motivational content. It's operational infrastructure.
Google rewrites roughly 61% of title tags. That number doesn't mean title tags don't matter — it means most title tags aren't aligned with what users are actually searching for.
Kief Studio runs two people, ships like fourteen. Not because we're heroic — because the math on communication overhead, tooling, and institutional knowledge works differently at our scale.
"Here's how these two platforms compare" is market context. It tells you what each product does. It doesn't tell you which one fits your environment, your team, or your constraints. That requires a different kind of work entirely.
Every time you post content on social media instead of your website, you're building someone else's asset. Your website is the only digital property you actually own.
Broad service offerings feel safer. They're not. The businesses that grow consistently and command premium pricing almost always have a narrower focus than their competitors.
Most people open Search Console to check rankings. It does much more than that — and the most valuable insights are in the data most people ignore.
Automation and hiring solve different problems. Conflating them is one of the more expensive strategic mistakes a growing business makes.
A founder kept using the word 'struggling' to describe a routine task. She didn't have a competence problem. She had a product-fit problem — and most people can't tell the difference from the inside.
