Everything I know about marketing, built into one small company

I'm Justin. I'm building Viajo, a Portuguese learning platform, by myself in Lisbon. I write down what I'm doing, why I'm doing it, and what I'm learning along the way.

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Current Status

Looking for a full-time role.

Open to contract work. US and EU citizen, based in Lisbon. Get in touch.

Three things I built (because I needed them)

Running this alone meant hitting the same walls a small team hits, without a team to hand them to. These are the three that took the longest to solve.

My Content Factory

Most AI writing asks the model to produce something and hope it's right. This does it the way I was taught to write before AI: research first, then let the findings shape the argument. Every claim points back to a source. If there's no source, there's no sentence.

The Workflow

My Tracking System

Somebody finds a post, leaves, comes back three times over two months, and eventually subscribes. Most setups can't tell you that was all one person. I built analytics that hold onto a single identity across every visit and every system, so when someone finally pays I can see the whole path that got them there.

Check it Out

Project Helios

Most AI tools forget everything the moment you close the tab. Mine reads and writes local files directly, ensuring every chat has access to big picture context at all times. This allows me to hand tasks to specialist personas with minimal handholding, and all files get updated as the plan moves along automatically.

See How It Works

See this infrastructure running live on my R&D platform: GetViajo.com →

A Look Behind the Curtain

I document my work here. You’ll find technical breakdowns of my projects, current experiments, and a few notes on my life as an American in Portugal.

My Projects
What I'm Doing Now
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Recent Posts & Notes

Article

Revenue leakage is a silent killer for digital products. You launch a premium report or audio course, and within a week, the direct S3 link appears on Reddit or Discord.

While you cannot stop a determined pirate from re-hosting a file, you can (and must) stop the far more common vector of casual link sharing.

This occurs because most "security" implementations protect the page, not the asset. They hide a permanent link behind a login wall. Once that link is exposed, authentication becomes irrelevant.

When I started building out the premium content library for GetViajo.com, my personal R&D lab for...

GetViajo
Article

Standard chatbots have a fatal flaw for professional work: they start from zero every time.

Sure, you can drag and drop your strategy files into the chat window at the start of every session. I did that for months. It works, until you forget one file and the AI builds a strategy based on last month's thinking.

At first I would solve this by building custom GPTs and Gemini Gems pre-loaded with both specific directions and important documents like my brand voice, pricing models, and audience research. This gave the AI the permanent context it needed to generate high-quality outputs.

GetViajo
Article

I come from an SEO background. For 8 years I ran an [[hwyh-archive|SEO and Content Marketing agency]].

I've done enough technical SEO audits and cleaned up enough messy internal link architectures to know that, over time, link rot impacts a LOT of teams.

If you publish content for years and years without a plan for managing and maintaining your internal links, you'll inevitably create dead ends, orphaned pages and links will break.

Observationally, this is all too common. For years, I saw teams treat SEO audits as a reactive cleanup phase. They would publish content, relying on a spreadsheet to...

GetViajo
A photo of Justin Borge

About Me

I'm Justin, a Bay Area native living in Lisbon since 2022. I spent eight years running a marketing consultancy, and now I build the systems underneath: analytics, email, content pipelines, the plumbing. When I'm not at the screen I'm usually exploring a new part of Europe with my wife, doing my best to keep up with fast Portuguese, or out with my camera. Thanks for being here.

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