Feb 2024 – Present · Performance marketing and web design agency serving businesses in FL, SC, GA, NC, and TN
- Lead SEO and local search delivery for client accounts: Google Business Profile, directory listings and citations, link building, and editorial placements.
- Wrote a full technical SEO and GEO audit and phased roadmap for hustlelaunch.com covering structured data gaps, rendering, IA and topic clusters, and AI crawler policy, sequenced into a 4–6 week foundation sprint and a 6–10 week architecture and performance phase.
- Built a 50+ directory NAP citation checklist used for client local-SEO audits.
- Built the Assessment Toolbar Chrome extension (2024) that opens the current page in Google's Rich Results Test, the Schema.org validator, PageSpeed Insights, WAVE, SpyFu, and other audit tools in one click.
- Build and maintain client and agency sites on Next.js, Convex, and Vercel, plus My.HustleLaunch.com, an AI marketing SaaS with a Buffer integration.
Contract Product Engineer, Zaxby's Franchising LLC
Aug 2024 – Feb 2026 · Sylva, NC, then Waynesville, NC · Martech, product engineering, and DevOps for the Zaxby's "Zamily" franchise network
- Built and shipped YourZaxbys local store marketing (LSM) and operations software that ZFL franchise owners could license for their stores.
- Contracted to train on site first at the Sylva, NC store (Aug 2024 – Mar 2025), then in Waynesville, NC, learning store workflows firsthand before building the software.
- LSM: store-level pages (menu, catering, events, community, careers) with location-specific metadata, event promotions, and a guest satisfaction survey; local growth playbook covering Google Business Profile, events, and partnerships.
- Ops: live shift dashboard (sales, labor % vs. goal, speed of service, COGS %, SMG guest satisfaction) fed by PAR, Crunchtime, Berry-AI, and SMG CSV ingestion; above-store dashboards for stores, schedules, audits, and reports; hiring, onboarding with encrypted SSNs, checklists, and Steritech tracking.
- Stack and DevOps: Next.js, Convex, Clerk, Recharts, Vercel, CI gates, Sentry, PostHog, Resend. Demos: wwwyourzaxbyscom.vercel.app, waynesvilleyourzaxbyscom.vercel.app
Current · Independent products and open source
- Technical SEO in the Age of Agentic AI (Sep 2026): 68-page, 10-chapter field guide on pages that people and browsing agents can understand and use (rendering, structured data and entity facts, crawler access policy, measurement), with a workbook, four sector playbooks, and a Python page-inspector toolkit with tests.
- url-to-md: CLI that converts HTML pages to clean Markdown for LLM ingestion, cutting token usage by about 40% compared with raw HTML.
- shagent / agent-os: Bun and TypeScript agent harness using MCP and OpenRouter, and a shell-native multi-agent orchestrator with a real-time WebSocket dashboard.
- stripe-convex: reusable Stripe + Convex payments package (checkout, cart, coupons, 19 webhook events).
- Ship and run production sites on Next.js, Convex, Clerk, Stripe, PostHog, Sentry, and Vercel, including michaelchurley.com, bestwnc.com (Western NC local business directory), and uncap.us.
Chief Technology Officer, Realay.com (Kaibo, LLC)
Mar 2023 – May 2024 · Real estate SaaS platform · Overlapped White Fox Studios and Hustle Launch
- Owned product engineering plus all marketing and martech development for a real estate SaaS platform, while the sales side handled outbound sales and partner onboarding.
- Took the product from a WordPress MVP to a React build.
Director of Operations, White Fox Studios
Feb 2015 – Feb 2024 · SEO agency
- The owner's only direct report; ran all agency operations: SEO strategy and delivery, sales, marketing, client delivery, and growth; built internal software and client systems.
- Built and still maintain the Rotary Swing iOS app.
