I’m a developer who learned marketing — on purpose.
Most marketers can’t read a crawl log. Most developers don’t know what a conversion funnel is. I decided to learn both — and it turns out that combination is rarer and more useful than I expected.
The background
I’ve spent my career as a full-stack .NET engineer — building web applications, designing APIs, working with databases, and architecting systems that need to actually hold up under real-world conditions. I know how the web works at a technical level: HTTP, rendering, caching, performance, infrastructure.
A while back I started paying attention to the marketing side of the products I was building. I noticed something: the tools and strategies that drive traffic, conversions, and revenue were full of problems that a developer could solve — but most marketers didn’t have the technical skills to fix them, and most developers didn’t care enough to try.
So I decided to learn digital marketing properly. Not just the surface level, but the technical depth — GA4 event models, crawl budgets, Core Web Vitals, server-side tracking, attribution modeling, data pipelines. The stuff that actually moves the needle.
alexbuildsonline.com is where I document that journey, share what I’m learning, and offer the services that come out of it.
What I actually do
Right now my focus is technical marketing audits — going deep on a business’s GA4 setup, technical SEO health, site performance, and tracking accuracy, then delivering a clear prioritized report on what to fix and how.
I work with small businesses, startups, and e-commerce brands who suspect something is wrong with their marketing setup but don’t know exactly what. Most of the time they’re right — and the problems are things an agency would either miss entirely or charge five times what I charge to fix.
As I build out my marketing skills over the next 6 months, I’ll be adding paid ads management, marketing automation setup, and analytics engineering to the mix. Everything I offer is something I’ve built and tested myself first.
Why developer + marketer is a useful combination
I can read what others can’t
HTTP status codes, JavaScript rendering issues, crawl logs, server response headers — these aren’t abstract concepts to me. When a site has a technical SEO problem, I find it at the source.
I implement, not just recommend
Most marketing consultants hand you a report and leave. If a fix requires touching code — schema markup, tracking scripts, redirect rules, performance changes — I can do it myself.
I think in systems, not tactics
Engineers build things that need to work reliably over time. That mindset — measurement, iteration, debugging — is exactly what good marketing requires and what most marketers skip.
I’m cheaper than an agency
No account managers, no junior staff, no outsourced work. You work directly with me. That keeps my overhead low and my prices honest.
Want to work together?
I’m currently taking on new audit clients. If your marketing setup feels broken or unclear, let’s find out why.