About - Luis Gomes
Founder & Growth Lead at Leanboat.
Luis is co-founder and Growth Lead at Leanboat. He has been building and operating digital businesses for more than two decades, working at the intersection of growth, software, content, and performance marketing.
As a founder and investor, he has run paid media programs that have spent $6M+ at positive ROAS across BusBuster (10+ years operating a US bus and train search platform), TheNextGuide (concept media brand built AI-native from day one), RioSkin Lab (launch partner and investor), Folivora Spirits (investor and growth advisor), GreenPeople (ecommerce and CRM lead, 2020–2022), and others.
At Leanboat he leads growth strategy on every engagement — the founder who actually owns the account, not a strategist who hands off to a junior.
Articles by Luis Gomes
May 25, 2026
The line between automated marketing and AI-native marketing is a feedback loop
We're moving TheNextGuide's content engine from automated to AI-native. The line isn't the model — it's the feedback loop. Here's the seven-step install at a tourism marketplace we operate, the structural difference named, and four questions to audit any AI marketing tool in your stack.
May 23, 2026
Three signals your B2B SaaS marketing budget is funding the wrong half of the funnel
Most B2B SaaS teams fund the half of the funnel their attribution dashboard can see and underfund the half it can't. Three signals you're on the wrong side of the flip, the AI-native rebuild of Walker's demand-creation framework, and a 30-day on-ramp. Series A (AI-Native Demand Creation), post 1 of 4.
May 20, 2026
How AI-native growth teams build a self-improving content engine
Most companies bolt AI onto an old workflow and call it productivity. The reframe: redesign the workflow as a recursive five-layer loop that gets smarter every Friday. Here's the loop we're running this blog through — sensor, policy, tool, quality gate, learning mechanism — and what's next in our self-improving process.
May 18, 2026
Why AI companies are starting to kill their own SaaS products — and how to tell if yours is next
At least one AI tool in your stack won't exist in its current form 18 months from now. The company is doing one of three things — rebuilding from scratch with the agent doing the work directly, getting quietly absorbed into a larger platform, or falling behind by bolting AI features onto older software. The careers page tells you which, months before any press release. Five-minute audit at the end.
May 16, 2026
AI-native acquisition: the three things changing for every company
A founder I work with sat down with last quarter's attribution data and spent two days trying to explain why three of her five biggest deals had "direct" as the source. The dashboard wasn't broken — the buyer's journey moved. Three structural shifts in acquisition that AI didn't cause but exposed, with the test for whether your stack is on the right side of each.
May 13, 2026
Auto-tuning is not experimentation. It is the discipline AI-CRO vendors are selling around.
Two DTC brands run CRO for three months. One turns on an AI vendor across hero, PDP, cart, and checkout; the dashboard shows compounding lifts. The other runs eight customer interviews, finds one bad piece of copy, fixes it, and moves the same number in a single week. Both 'did CRO.' Only one ran the discipline auto-tuning vendors charge to skip.
May 12, 2026
Your AI marketing agent is reading whatever broke last quarter
A loyal customer called support twice last week and waited 38 minutes for a callback. Your email tool doesn't know — so the AI agent sitting on top of it just sent her the win-back discount. The agent didn't get it wrong; the data it could see was wrong. Before you point an AI at your marketing stack, run the audit that's upstream of the install.
May 11, 2026
Micro Agency. The category just got named — and it’s the shape we’ve been building toward.
Rize published the Micro Agency Playbook — five tenets that read like a checklist someone wrote after watching the same shape emerge across Every, Crosby, Pace, Butler/Till, and the Forward Deployed Engineer pattern. None of these companies set out to be a Micro Agency. They just kept making the same architectural choices. Leanboat is a Micro Agency for consumer and software brands.
May 9, 2026
Bad delegators make bad AI operators. The single best predictor of whether your AI rollout works.
Two operators on the same team, same model, same brief, ship wildly different output. The gap is not prompt-craft. It is delegation discipline — the ability to write down what you are thinking cleanly enough that another person, or an agent, can act on it. Here is how to spot a bad delegator before the AI install.
May 6, 2026
The conversion floor. AI growth shows up in margin only when the funnel converts.
AI on top of paid acquisition compounds whatever the destination already does. If the funnel converts, the lift is real. If it does not, AI just makes the leak faster. The CRO install we run before — or alongside — the rest.
May 5, 2026
Time back. The first AI install most teams should run.
Deep-dive on box 1 of the AI-Native Foothold framing. The senior person's most repetitive five hours a week, automated. 30-day install, real math, predictable failure modes named upfront.
May 5, 2026
Faster response. What "AI in customer support" actually looks like.
Deep-dive on box 2 of the AI-Native Foothold framing. AI handles the first response on customer queries, sales leads, and internal questions. Humans handle everything else. The line is sharp on purpose.
May 5, 2026
Institutional memory. Turning what's in your team's heads into a base.
Deep-dive on box 3 of the AI-Native Foothold framing. Turn what lives in your team's heads into a queryable system before someone leaves. The slowest install to feel and the one that compounds the most.
May 5, 2026
Quality floor. AI as a second pair of eyes on every piece of work.
Deep-dive on box 4 of the AI-Native Foothold framing. AI between the junior output and the senior reviewer. The bottom of the team's output rises to meet the top; the senior person catches what only they can.
May 4, 2026
You want AI in your company. Start with one of four jobs.
Most owners want AI in their company. They cannot articulate where it fits. Generic training does not fix that. There are four jobs that pay back in 30 days. Pick one. Install it. Then pick the next.
May 3, 2026
Your AI agency is probably AI-painted. Here's the test.
Five questions to run on the next agency that pitches you AI. AI-painted agencies fail multiple questions in a row. AI-native agencies pass all five with specifics. About 30 minutes of the prospect's time.
May 2, 2026
One marketer is doing the work of five. Here's the actual stack.
The published 5x marketer numbers are real. What gets skipped is the three-layer stack underneath — research, methodology, process — that has to all be present for the math to work.
April 30, 2026
Your retention loop is open. Here's what it costs you.
Most retention programs run as open loops — work goes out, metrics come back, the system never improves between attention. Closing the loop is now possible at small-brand scale. Here is what changes when it happens.
April 28, 2026
The AI-native marketing team. What it actually looks like.
Six independent publications now describe the same shape for an AI-native marketing team — three roles plus AI agents underneath. The framework is right at one scale and wrong at another. Here is both.
April 26, 2026
We're an AI-native agency for consumer and software brands. Here's what that means.
The category exists now. Six months ago AI-native agency was a thesis; today there are published exemplars and a documented playbook. We are an AI-native agency for consumer and software brands. Here is what that actually means.
April 25, 2026
Use AI for things only you can say. Stop using it for things anyone could say.
The rule for every piece of content we ship: use AI to move faster around things only you can say. Don't use it to produce things anyone could say. Lily Ray has watched 20–30 sites lose traction in three months ignoring this rule.
April 24, 2026
Agentic media buying is the real AI play. Ad copy is the distraction.
Most agencies pitching AI in paid are pitching the wrong AI. Ad copy variations are the small play. Agentic media buying that closes the loop between bid, creative, audience, and outcome is the architectural shift.