About

Who is Elbert Ballo Jr?

Elbert Ballo Jr is a marketing engineer in Orange County, California who runs a startup's full marketing stack as a one-person team, on AI agents: websites, lead capture, CRM routing, outbound, and SEO. He is the Founding Marketing Engineer at Staxiom, where he built the lead pipeline end to end, and the founder of socalstartups.io, a free directory of the Southern California startup ecosystem.

Why is he the right fit?

1. Builds the whole system, not one piece.Writes the Next.js and React code and also runs the martech: HubSpot, Smartlead, Search Console, and Google Business Profile. Marketing and engineering usually sit in different people.
2. Ships end to end, solo.Built socalstartups.io alone, from database to SEO, and runs a pipeline that has put 58 sites live.
3. Results with numbers.At Gusto, a self-serve product he led funded $3M+ in R&D tax credits in year one and cut onboarding time 62%. At Ardius, customer satisfaction rose 28%.
4. Knows startup finance from the inside.Years in R&D tax-credit products at Ardius and Gusto, now at a startup accounting and tax firm. He speaks the customer's language.
5. Uses AI and automation where it removes work.Automated a content pipeline to $0.25 a video and a YouTube channel to monetization in 2 months, and built lead scoring and outbound workflows that run without manual steps.
6. Lets the data decide.Spiderbot only builds what search data supports and prunes what does not perform.

What does a marketing engineer do?

A marketing engineer builds the systems that bring customers in, in code rather than by hand. In his work that means prerendered websites for SEO, lead capture that routes into a CRM with real-time alerts, verified outbound email workflows, and AI-assisted automation that removes manual steps.

Where has he worked?

What tools does he use?

HubSpot, Smartlead, Slack, Google Search Console, Google Business Profile, Ahrefs, DataForSEO, Next.js, React, Vercel, and Supabase.

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