You may have heard the cliché about selling everything, buying a boat, and sailing off—we did it. : )

Here’s how that experience led me to start Namakina, a venture poised to solve a big problem in the marketing industry by unlocking the power of AI.

Why We Took the Trip

Within six months, I lost two dear friends—a mentor and a business partner—leaving me questioning the meaning of my work. Meanwhile, I’d dreamed since childhood of living on a boat. With our three boys and two dogs, my wife and I packed our lives onto a vessel for a year across the Caribbean and from Florida to Maine.

The Trip

It was magical... crystal-clear water, fresh mahi dinners, colorful laundry hung from our bow. But also nerve-wracking... taking on water mid-crossing from the Bahamas to the US, no land in sight. And through much of it, one question persisted: What’s my next move for genuine impact?

The Moment In the Exumas—arguably the most breathtaking place on earth—I was in the dinghy crossing the bay for provisions in Georgetown. As I passed a weathered sailor filling his water cans, a surprising sense of contentment took hold, and I had a profound realization: I’d reached the pinnacle of my dream, yet I still wanted to grow, and to be of value to society. Island life was wonderful, but my greatest value was in building.

The AI Aha

Returning to land felt disorienting—until I went deep with Claude, GPT, Llama, etc. They lit me up like the early days of the internet: late nights, life-changing insight. The potential of large language models (LLMs) to transform lives and disrupt business models, especially in marketing, was astounding.

Namakina Emerges

I combined insight from generating 3B intent signals while at Thumb and marketing for clients like Universal Studios and Nike, with AI’s pattern-matching potential. Namakina was born—pairing emotionally intelligent, sales stage aware, AI with consumers' readiness for change, funneling them to personalized ideas and recommendations at just the right time.

The Breakthrough

We started researching and experimenting with AI agents that form an ideal experience for each side of the market, think a need-focused buyer's agent and conversion-focused seller's agent... a concierge of sorts. What we discovered was a replicable process to create highly personalized, sentiment aware, journeys that collapse marketing funnels and get both parties what they want. The prototypes produced wild results, generating customer acquisition costs at a fraction of industry benchmarks. These numbers may settle over time, but they illustrate the “marketing disruption” we can leverage to build Namakina, a proactive, emotionally intelligent, AI that unlocks revenue for brands.

What’s Next

Namakina isn’t publicly available yet; some parts are duct-taped (like the boat on that crossing). We'll let you know when it's ready.