Carl Xiong

Spent a few years in finance and corporate strategy, then took everything I knew and put it to the test building a B2C business from zero. Grew it to 70K+ subscribers and $100K ARR with no paid spend in 15 months, handling everything from positioning and pricing to content, distribution, and retention. That experience gave me a clear view of how all the pieces of a go-to-market actually fit together.

In the past three years I've done the full range: product development, long-form video, short-form, blog, landing pages, sales narratives, campaign strategy. Everything I build starts with a commercial question: what does this need to do for the business?

I think about business problems in terms of systems. What's the positioning? Who's the buyer? What's the channel strategy? How does the unit economics work? The finance background trained me to connect everything back to outcomes, and that lens applies whether I'm shaping a product narrative, building a launch plan, or figuring out why a funnel isn't converting.

Now I run Kairo, a content and growth studio working with early-stage founders who have a strong product but haven't figured out the distribution layer yet. A lot of our work is also with teams in Asia breaking into the North American market, where the gap is almost never the product but the messaging and storytelling.

I spend a lot of time thinking about why certain messaging works and other messaging doesn't, how attention economies function, and what the AI shift means for how companies build audiences. I wrote about my career arc here if you're curious about the longer story.