Ryan Carlin

Founder · Exit Engine

We build growth systems that survive due diligence. Built inside software companies, now available to you.

Most growth work is a person. It lives in someone's head, runs on them remembering to check things, and leaves when they do. That's fine until someone looks at the business closely — a buyer, a board, a new CRO — and finds there's no system underneath, just a hard-working operator.

Our work is turning that judgment into something that runs without us. Usually that means an agent on a schedule, a short list of decisions a human makes each week, and a log that shows exactly why every change happened.

A letter from the founder

In 2011 I took a freelance job writing press releases for a company that sent food trucks to weddings and office parties. I stayed ten years. Roaming Hunger was the first startup I ever worked at. I was employee number three, I owned a piece of it, and I grew up inside it, from the guy writing copy to the one building the performance, lifecycle and B2B demand engines that sold kitchens on wheels to companies that had never thought to hire one. Then Shore Capital Partners bought it in a $36 million exit, and I learned from the cap table what a buyer actually looks for. Not the clever campaign. Not the heroic weekend. They look for the machine that will still be humming on a Tuesday after everyone who built it has gone home.

I took that lesson to Carrot, where I ran marketing and demand generation for four years, and it held there too: the growth that lasts is the growth nobody has to remember to do. Exit Engine is that lesson, offered to founders before the buyer comes knocking instead of after. I'll build the engine, write down why every part of it moves, and hand you the keys. If I do it right, you'll stop needing me, and that's the whole point.

RyanLos Angeles

What we work on

SEO and AI search — a done-for-you agent that audits a site every week, writes each fix as a ready-to-ship work item, and ships it once you approve. The goal is ranking in Google and getting cited by ChatGPT.
Account-based marketing — targeting, signals, and sequences that book meetings without burning the domain.
The underlying system — the audit, the build, and the handover, in that order. The handover is the part most engagements skip.

See the work

The most complete public example is the SEO agent we built and run for a client every week. The write-up includes the architecture, the exclusion rules, a demo video, and the numbers from a real run — including the week it was partly wrong.

We built an SEO agent. Its best feature is saying no.

Everything else we publish is on the Exit Engine blog.

Elsewhere

Work with us

Thirty minutes. No deck. We'll know within ten if there's a lever worth pulling.

Book the intro call

Exit Engine is the trading name of Kadima LLC, Los Angeles, CA.