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Amelia S. Gagne

CEO and co-founder of Kief Studio. Full-stack developer and strategist. Perplexity AI Business Fellow. In tech since 2012.

https://ameliasgagne.com

146 articles

Strategy Mar 2, 2026 5 min

"This Pricing Expires Friday" and Other Reasons to Slow Down

"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.

Psychology Feb 27, 2026 8 min

Positive Psychology Isn't Soft. It's How Founders Survive.

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.

SEO Feb 26, 2026 5 min

Title Tags and Meta Descriptions Done Right

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.

Operations Feb 25, 2026 5 min

The Two-Person Studio Model: Why We Don't Scale Headcount

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.

Strategy Feb 24, 2026 5 min

Why Platform Comparisons Don't Count as Technology Advice

"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.

Strategy Feb 20, 2026 6 min

The Case for Deep Specialization

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.

SEO Feb 19, 2026 6 min

Search Console Goes Deeper Than Rankings

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.

Entrepreneurship Feb 18, 2026 6 min

When to Automate and When to Hire

Automation and hiring solve different problems. Conflating them is one of the more expensive strategic mistakes a growing business makes.

Strategy Feb 13, 2026 7 min

How to Actually Evaluate a Technology Vendor

A capabilities deck tells you what a vendor wants you to know. The right questions reveal what you need to know. A framework for vendor evaluation that goes past the demo.