The Founder

23 years in growth. One lesson that cost me millions.

I'm Kyan Gao. I spent more than two decades helping founders grow — and did founder-led growth for 100+ of them. Then I tried to turn it into a product, and learned the hard way what actually breaks.

01 · What I did for 23 years

I made founders known — by hand

For more than 23 years I worked in marketing and business growth, doing founder-led growth for 100+ founders. I knew how to turn a founder's expertise into authority, audience, and inbound. The problem was that it lived in my head and my hours — it didn't scale.

02 · The expensive failure

I tried to productize it — and lost millions

So I tried to build it into a company: a 20-person team and expensive technical hires. It didn't work. Founder expertise kept getting lost between interviews, briefs, revisions, and execution — by the time content shipped, the founder's real judgment had been diluted out of it. I lost millions before I admitted the model itself was wrong.

03 · The insight

Most founders don't have a content problem

The best content already existed — inside the founder's expertise, customer conversations, and decisions. The thing missing was never more writing. It was a way to capture what the founder already knew, and a playbook to market it. Knowledge first. Content second.

04 · The rebuild

When AI got good enough, I rebuilt the whole thing

Runnax is that rebuild. It turns distribution into a system: it diagnoses why customers aren't finding you, finds what actually works, builds the plan, and runs it — generating content in your voice and re-optimizing weekly. You can build it; Runnax gets you customers. Your system stays private.

05 · Why I'm doing this in the open

I built a 1M+ audience in China. In English, I'm starting from zero.

I grew an audience of over a million on Douyin in China — so I know how to do this. But in English, to an overseas audience, I'm genuinely starting from zero. So I'm doing it in public: a 90-day experiment, building the audience from scratch with Runnax, every word generated by the product, real numbers shared as they happen. If it works, you'll see it work. If it doesn't, you'll see that too.

Watch it work on your business

Enter your website and Runnax builds your founder content strategy — free. The same system I'm using on myself.

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