Reggie Tan
Fractional CMO & AI Strategic Advisor
Most AI, fintech, and Web3 founders have a technology advantage and a marketing problem. I fix that.
Learning to build
1999
Computer science
Four years learning to make things work, and a growing certainty I didn't want to spend my life doing it from behind a screen.
2003
Marketing, George Brown College
The theory was that I had more interpersonal and creative range than a terminal was asking for.
2006
Corporate marketing
Steady, structured, and nothing I'd put on a page like this.
Learning what's worth building
2008
The recession
Back to zero. No plan, no leverage.
2009-2016
Gotstyle Menswear
Second-floor club clothing when I got there. Multi-location high-end suiting with a real ecommerce business when I left. The owner let me try things nobody had approved, and it worked: a thousand blog visits a day, a Pinterest account past 100,000 followers within months on no paid spend and 300,000 since, and a campaign that hit 7.2 million YouTube views before extending into a game with real-world rewards, an SMS partnership with Cineplex, and live events. Silver at the 2013 Shopper Innovation Awards, one spot behind McDonald's.
None of what worked at Gotstyle came from a best-practices document. It came from a small business owner deciding to trust someone who had just lost everything, and that someone moving fast enough to catch a moment while it was still moving.
That's the pattern I've been chasing since. Anyone can be a competent marketer. Great marketing takes bold ideas, a trending moment you actually catch, the right people in the room, and some luck. Every startup wants the 10x idea. Most of the work is building the conditions where one survives contact with the org chart.
2012
Certified Scrum Product Owner
If I was going to keep working with product teams, I wanted to run at their cadence.
2015
Growth hacking for startups
Same instincts, faster clocks, less budget.
2017
Blockchain and fintech
Technical founders with real products and no idea how to explain them.
Closing the distance
2023
Story Mode
Plus a Claude Max subscription, which is the part that actually changed things. Every AI tool before it had training wheels. Building real agentic workflows in Claude Code meant execution stopped being the bottleneck. Positioning on Monday, working system by Friday.
2025
Haven Workspace
Niagara's first coworking and event space, in a town my wife and I kept accidentally vacationing in until we admitted we should live there.
What founders tend to notice a few months in is that two things arrive together. Twenty years of pattern recognition about what actually works, and the ability to go build it the same week.
Roles
- Founder, Story Mode Marketing Company Inc.
- Co-Founder, Haven Workspace (Niagara-on-the-Lake)
- Founding Partner, Metaverse Bar Association
- VP of Growth, Myosin DAO
- Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO), Scrum Alliance
Speaking
- AI Automation in Marketing: Building Lean Growth with Intelligent Agents
- Metaverse and Web3: Next Frontier of Brand Building
- Growth Hacking Your Web3 Product
- The Crypto Power Lunch: Exploring the Wild West of Cryptocurrencies and NFTs
- Ask the Expert: Fintech Growth Hacking
Most engagements run monthly, scoped to a set number of days per week. Cost depends on scope and stage, and it's a fraction of a full-time CMO salary with no equity, benefits, or severance attached. Book a call and I'll quote against what you actually need.
An agency sells you delivery against a brief someone else has to write. A fractional CMO writes the brief, owns the number, sits in your leadership meetings, and manages the agencies you already have. I embed with your team rather than working alongside it.
Typically two to three days a week. Enough to own the function and be present for the decisions, structured so you're not paying for a full-time seat before you need one.
When the function is built, the hires are in, and the systems run without you. That's the goal of the engagement, not a failure of it. Usually somewhere past Series B.
AI and SaaS, fintech, dev tools, Web3 and crypto, B2B, and enterprise. Most clients are technical founding teams between Seed and Series B.
Custom workflows built for your stack that handle outreach, content repurposing, reporting, and analytics without a person driving each step. Built in Claude Code and n8n, not configured in a generic SaaS tool.
Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario. I work remotely with founders and organizations across North America and Europe, and I'm an hour and a half from Toronto for anything in person.
