My name's Darren and I'm head of marketing and communications at Transparently, an AI startup which helps companies detect accounting manipulation and fraud. Before this, I spent 18 years at Bloomberg and over 20 years as a journalist. I always knew I wanted to work in newspapers — my first proper media job was at The Age in Melbourne in the late '90s, where I started as a copy boy and worked my way up to the news desk. Eventually, I moved into a digital tech section, which wasn’t a great fit, so I looked around and landed an internship at Bloomberg. What was supposed to be six months turned into nearly two decades, taking me from Melbourne to Sydney and finally Hong Kong.

At Bloomberg, I primarily covered markets, leading regional coverage during key events like the Global Financial Crisis and the flash crash. Later, I shifted to covering banks, which exposed me to fintech and crypto — especially during the Mt. Gox collapse. That curiosity grew further when I met Arthur Hayes, founder of BitMEX, just as his exchange was getting started.

Eventually, I left Bloomberg in 2017 to dive into crypto full-time, joining a startup now called Chaos Theory as Chief Communications Officer. I worked closely with the CEO on various projects — from a blockchain explorer to an underwear brand — and led the build of The AllStar, a sports app still available today. My  journey, though intense, taught me the realities of startup life: how to adapt fast, work lean, and constantly learn. Through my two years at the helm of The AllStar, I developed a deep interest in marketing and SEO, which led me to take courses and shift from pure content creation to a broader marketing focus. 

That marked the start of the next phase of my career, and incidentally led to my first experience with GenAI and AI-empowered content creation AI and content feature strongly at Transparently. A lot of what I do revolves around content — it’s central to our strategy. Because we’re a data-rich, tech-driven product, especially in the AI space, one of the best ways to showcase our value and build our brand is by highlighting the unique insights our data generates. So content plays a huge role in surfacing use cases and telling that story. That said, I’m a team of one at Transparently, so everything from content to social media also falls under my remit.

I see marketing as the intersection of two core things:

If you can’t clearly explain — in one sentence — what problem your product solves, that’s a red flag. You need a product that’s genuinely useful and a clearly defined audience. Once you have those two pillars, marketing is simply the process of bridging the gap between them.

To me, it all starts with strong foundations. I love pyramids as a visual model — probably because I think in terms of funnels and frameworks. At the base of your pyramid, you need absolute clarity: What is your product? What problem does it solve? Who does it solve it for? Everything — from your go-to-market strategy to your product roadmap to your hiring decisions — should cascade from that central understanding.

Once that alignment is in place, executing becomes much easier. Not just in terms of marketing and sales, but in shaping the product itself and building the right team to support it. Strategy, messaging, execution — it all flows from that foundational clarity.

Just a quick word on marketing strategy — there are many different approaches, and the right one depends entirely on your product and audience. A good marketing lead doesn’t come in with a cookie-cutter playbook. If they do, it’s probably time to look for someone else. Every product or service is — or should be — unique, and your strategy needs to reflect that.

So, ultimately, your approach has to be tailored — different products call for different playbooks.

I like to think of SEO in 3 stages:

Before I get into these, I want to address an important point about AI that many SEO marketers are grappling with, which is the rise of Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO). 

Annual searches on ChatGPT reached 365 billion within just two years, a milestone that took Google’s search engine more than a decade to match, according to Mary Meeker’s Trends – Artificial Intelligence report. The speed of that adoption shows a fundamental shift in how people look for answers: many now skip the browser bar and ask a language model instead.

That being the case, does this relegate SEO to history? Not really, and let me explain. Generative models are trained on - and continue to retrieve information from - the open web. If your content is not well-structured, crawlable, and linked by credible sources, it has little chance of surfacing in a traditional search result or being cited by an AI assistant.

Think of SEO as laying the roads and signage; GEO is the sat-nav that guides travellers along them. Strong technical SEO makes your site visible to crawlers, while GEO layers on semantic clarity and authority signals so large language models recognise your brand as a credible, expert source when generating answers.

The payoff is visibility: High-quality pages that rank on Google also feed the datasets and real-time retrieval systems behind ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and the next wave of enterprise agents. Master the old rules, then optimise for the new ones.

In short, SEO gives your content an address; GEO makes it a landmark. And that’s why startup founders should still care about SEO and the tips that follow.

A good SEO strategy starts with the basics: What is your product, and who are you trying to reach?

Let’s say your product is tennis rackets, and your target customers are players in Timbuktu. Now, you’ve identified your product and your target market: tennis players in Timbuktu.

To build an effective SEO-driven content strategy, the next step is to ask: What matters to this specific audience? You’d brainstorm relevant topics — like tennis racket technology, tennis venues in Timbuktu, local tournaments, or profiles of top local players.