REcognition
AT a Glance
Meaning Architect and Experience Engineer
Founders: I'm here to prove you right.
I am the layer between what your company knows about itself and what your market needs to feel.
Bring me in while you're finding product-market fit. I capture your customer's language, thoughts, feelings, values, and lived experience with the depth only a film director brings to character—because I am one.
I'm passionately drawn to deep tech, frontier, and AI companies enabling human agency.
Meaning Architect
I find the truth underneath the one your company thinks it's telling.
Experience Engineer
I create the things to make your market feel that truth.
I use AI to supercharge my process, but the one thing it could never replace about me?
Making something out of nothing.
TL;DR in Jargon: I'm your 0 → 1 founding marketer here to build the GTM foundation you need in order to actually connect to your market and scale.
Shay Van Lue
Be Magnetic. Create Truth.
Phone Number
Request via Email
shay@shayvanlue.com
Current Residence
Greater Fort Collins Area
Relocating to San Francisco
Current time
Okay But…
Why Me and not the Growth-Bro?
I work in context, not just metrics.
A Growth-Bro is built for 1 → X. He scales an engine that already exists. That's step 2.
A Founding Marketer is the generalist that builds from 0 → 1, creating order out of chaos—that's me. I'm the one that builds the engine and makes it clear who you are. This is step 1.
And that means establishing the why behind the how and what. Knowing who you are and who you're for makes every dollar a defined bet instead of a slide-deck fantasy.
Scene: you closed capital, you're chasing PMF. Experiments run, fixes and features ship, but dashboards bleed, spend is off the rails, and investors are twitching. You're gutted, sleepless—about to knee-jerk on doubling down or torching your entire positioning because nobody has any idea what to do or why.
That's where I come in.
I listen.
I audit.
I unearth the signals your dashboards can’t see.
I reveal who you are and who you're for.
Then I build the infrastructure that catches and compounds what’s real.
The result? You now understand why your market behaves the way it does before you waste six months scaling the wrong assumptions.
That being said: if you want collaboration, discernment, systems, clear positioning, and a real understanding of your market? I'll move mountains with you.
But if you want to throw money at something and hope it plays mommy-maid for you? Go hire the Growth-Bro.
The choice is yours. 🤷
Sectors
AI
Deep Tech
SaaS
Film & Arts
Luxury
Retail
Commercial Real Estate
Events (10 to 100K+)
Current stack
NON-EXHAUsTIVE

Claude

Claude Code

Perplexity

ChatGPT

PostHog

Airtable

Google Analytics (GA4)

Google Ads

Search Console

Google G Suite

ahrefs
Looker Studio

Google BigQuery

PostgreSQL

WordPress

Zoho One

HubSpot

Salesforce

Microsoft Office Suite

Excel (VBA Coding)

Notion

ElevenLabs

Adobe Creative Cloud

Acrobat

Photoshop

Lightroom Classic

Premiere Pro

Illustrator

InDesign

Procreate

Agorapulse

Later

Framer

CapCut


TikTok


Meta
My Philosophy is the Process
Be Magnetic. Create Truth.
Here's how I build:
01
02
03
04
05
Identity is iterative, and positioning is never finished.
Case Studies
Startup Positioning Teardowns
Inside My Brain





