Your stack is a Frankenstein.
Booking platform, CRM, ad accounts, and site all live in separate silos. Leads fall between systems. Nobody owns the seam. You're paying Google Ads to create a conversion leak.
AI-Native GTM Consultancy
Your AI-powered go-to-market engine.
Cedarwind gives founders the leverage of a 50-person GTM and operations org — without the overhead. We design AI-native strategy, build the stack, and rewire your funnel so it works as one system.
Trusted by
10×
Leverage on a founder-led GTM motion — without adding headcount.
80%
Of manual GTM and ops tasks routinely eliminated within an engagement.
3wks
From diagnostic kickoff to a working AI-native execution layer in production.
AI-First
Every recommendation is built around AI primitives — not retrofitted onto them.
The Problem
Founders are running a $5M business on a $50K stack — and paying the difference in lost deals.
Three patterns we see in every diagnostic. Different industries, same shape.
Manual ops is eating your week.
You — or your most expensive person — spends Tuesday answering trial inquiries by hand, Wednesday reconciling pipeline in Notion, Thursday writing the same follow-up email for the 400th time.
You don't have time to learn AI properly.
You know AI should be changing how you operate. You don't know which tools matter, which are noise, or where they'd plug in. So nothing changes, and the gap widens.
Services
AI-native GTM, three ways in.
Engagements are scoped to fit founders who'd rather ship than steer a committee. Pick the one that matches where you're stuck.
AI GTM Strategy
A 2-week outside-in diagnostic of how a cold visitor actually experiences your funnel — and the smallest set of moves that doubles conversion before quarter-end.
- Funnel teardown across paid, organic & referral
- ICP, positioning & messaging tightening
- 90-day GTM roadmap with sequenced bets
- Pricing & packaging audit
AI Stack Architecture
We design and build the thin AI-native integration layer that connects your booking, CRM, site, and ads — so your funnel runs as a single system, not five.
- Tool selection across CRM, ESP, automation & LLM ops
- Custom AI agents for intake, qualification & follow-up
- Integration plumbing — APIs, webhooks, workflows
- Observability so you can see what's working
GTM Process Optimization
We rebuild your day-to-day ops around AI — turning 20-hour weekly grinds into 20-minute review queues your team actually trusts.
- Manual workflow audit & automation map
- SOPs rewritten as agent-runnable playbooks
- Team enablement — prompts, guardrails, review loops
- Quarterly review cadence to keep gains compounding
Process
Diagnose. Architect. Activate. Scale.
A four-phase cadence borrowed from McKinsey, sharpened for startups. You see working output by week three, not month three.
Weeks 1 – 2
Diagnose
Outside-in audit of funnel, stack, and ops. We meet your team, map every handoff, and surface where leads and hours actually leak.
Week 3
Architect
A sequenced AI-native blueprint — what to build, what to retire, what to leave alone. You approve the shape before anyone writes code.
Weeks 4 – 8
Activate
We build and ship the integration layer, agents, and rewritten workflows. You're seeing real funnel changes before the engagement ends.
Quarterly
Scale
A standing review cadence — measure what's working, retire what isn't, extend the playbook into the next motion (events, partner, enterprise).
Who It's For
Built for operators who'd rather ship than steer.
Most of our work falls in three shapes. If you recognize yourself here, you're our person.
Early-stage startups
Pre-Series A teams with 1 – 15 people, a product in market, and a founder doing GTM on the side. You need a system, not another part-time hire.
$0 – $5M ARR
Founder-led sales
Growing SMBs
Multi-location or services businesses with $5 – $50M revenue, real ad spend, and a CRM nobody trusts. Old playbooks are leaking. New ones live in AI.
$5 – $50M revenue
Ops-heavy
Solo founders & operators
You're the strategist, the marketer, and the closer. You want a 50-person team's leverage compressed into a stack you can run before your second coffee.
1 – 3 people
High output
Case Study
One funnel, four tools, leads falling through the seams.
How a multi-location racquet & fitness club in the Northeast turned a fragmented trial-to-membership funnel into a single AI-native system — in under eight weeks.
Challenge
A broken trial-to-membership intake flow spread across disconnected booking, CRM, and website tools. Inbound leads from paid search hit a 43-field form, bounced to a separate scheduler, and surfaced in a CRM only after the front desk had time to type them in. Hot leads cooled overnight. The team knew the funnel was leaking but couldn't see where.
Approach
We audited the full customer journey end-to-end — from ad impression to first court visit — and then built a thin AI-native integration layer connecting the booking platform, CRM, and website. New leads are now classified, scheduled, and assigned in seconds; the front desk reviews a queue instead of typing. The funnel works as one system.
Results
Lead response collapsed from hours to seconds. Trial-to-paid conversion lifted meaningfully on the same ad budget. The owner reclaimed a working day a week previously spent on lead triage and pipeline reconciliation.
Case Study
Six channels. One ledger. Half the wasted spend.
How the same multi-location club's $3M+ paid media program drove 47% more paying members at the same budget — once online ad spend was tied honestly to in-person membership signups.
Challenge
Six paid channels — Google Search, Performance Max, Meta, YouTube, plus local print and outdoor — running in parallel with no shared definition of success. Each ad platform claimed credit for the same membership signup. Click-attribution dashboards overstated the winners by 4×, quietly rewarding the channels easiest to measure, not the ones actually filling courts. Spend was rising faster than members; nobody could say which dollar was wasted.
Approach
We instrumented every paid touchpoint with first-party tracking tied to the booking platform — then closed the loop: trial booked → trial completed → membership signed. Offline conversions flowed back to Google and Meta so their algorithms started optimizing for paid members, not pageviews. Campaign management was rebuilt around a single weekly ledger — one number per channel, one decision per channel — plus an automation layer that retired manual bid-and-budget triage.
Results
The honest ledger reallocated 38% of paid spend off channels that looked great in clicks and never drove offline. The same budget produced 47% more paying members in the next two quarters. Blended CAC dropped from $284 to $176. The campaign-management cadence collapsed from a 15-hour-a-week firefight to a 45-minute Friday review.
The AI Advantage
The old playbook is too slow. We don't run it.
Traditional consultancies sell you a 60-slide deck. We ship a working system. The difference is who's holding the keyboard — and what tools they have.
An operator with the leverage of a team of fifty.
Every Cedarwind engagement is run by Stuart — directly. AI gives him the leverage of a senior strategist, a research analyst, a copywriter, an ops engineer, and a CRM admin, all at once. You get one phone number to call and the throughput of a small agency.
That's the structural advantage: we don't pass your account to a junior. There is no junior.
Traditional consultancy
Cedarwind
6-month engagement → deck
8-week engagement → working system
Junior associates on the keyboard
Senior operator + AI on every task
Recommendations you implement
Integration layer we ship for you
Bills by the hour
Bills by the project, scoped up-front
Industry frameworks
Founder pattern-recognition + AI primitives
Why Cedarwind
Operator-grade work, priced like a project.
Four reasons founders pick us over the alternatives — including doing it themselves.
Operator, not agency.
Twenty years of GTM at Intuit, Google, McKinsey, and an EdTech startup — not pitch decks built by someone who has never run one of your line items.
AI-native from day one.
We don't bolt AI onto a 2018 playbook. The diagnostic, the architecture, and the build are all designed around AI primitives from the start.
Working systems in weeks.
Every engagement ships production code or production process. You aren't paying us to produce another roadmap that lives in a Notion doc.
One phone number.
You call Stuart. Stuart writes the code, runs the diagnostic, sits on the kickoff. No account managers, no offshore teams, no Slack channel with twelve strangers.
Meet the Founder
Twenty years inside the world's best growth engines — distilled into one practice.
Stuart Chuang
Founder · Cedarwind
Stuart Chuang. Operator first, consultant second.
Stuart built and scaled growth motions inside Intuit's Mailchimp acquisition, Google's Ads org, and McKinsey's growth practice. He's been the founder running the funnel at an early-stage EdTech startup, and the engineer at TSMC before that. Few practitioners have seen the playbook from every chair — analyst, operator, founder, advisor — at the level of scale Stuart has.
Cedarwind is the distillation: the patterns that actually move revenue, encoded into AI-native systems any founder can ship — without hiring a team to babysit them.
FAQ
Questions founders ask before the first call.
Straight answers on what Cedarwind is, who it's for, and how engagements actually work.
What is an AI-native GTM consultancy?
Cedarwind is an AI-native go-to-market consultancy for founders, early-stage startups, and SMBs. It designs AI-native GTM strategy, builds the supporting stack, and rewires your funnel so it runs as one system — giving you the leverage of a 50-person GTM and operations org without the overhead.
Who is Cedarwind for?
Three kinds of operators: early-stage startups (pre-Series A, $0–5M ARR, founder-led sales), growing SMBs ($5–50M revenue with real ad spend and ops), and solo founders who want a team's leverage without hiring one.
How is Cedarwind different from a traditional agency or consultancy?
A traditional consultancy hands you a 60-slide deck; an agency rents you junior execution. Cedarwind ships a working system. Every engagement is run directly by Stuart with AI leverage — one phone number, no junior hand-off, and senior judgment on every task.
What services does Cedarwind offer?
Three. AI GTM Strategy — a two-week outside-in funnel diagnostic and 90-day roadmap. AI Stack Architecture — the integration layer connecting CRM, booking, site, and ads, plus custom AI agents. GTM Process Optimization — rebuilding manual ops around AI so 20-hour weekly grinds become 20-minute review queues.
How long does an engagement take?
You see working output by week three, not month three. The four-phase cadence — Diagnose (weeks 1–2), Architect (week 3), Activate (weeks 4–8), and a quarterly Scale review — delivers a working AI-native system in weeks, where a traditional build takes six months.
How is pricing structured?
By the project, scoped up front — not billed by the hour. Engagements are sized to fit founders, so you know the shape and the cost before any work starts. The best way to get a scoped quote is a 30-minute strategy call.
Isn't a solo operator riskier than an agency?
You get a senior operator on every task instead of an account manager relaying to a rotating bench of juniors. AI gives Stuart the throughput of a small agency — strategist, analyst, copywriter, ops engineer, and CRM admin at once — with one accountable owner.
What does “AI-native” actually mean?
The diagnostic, the architecture, and the build are all designed around AI primitives from the start — not AI bolted onto a 2018 playbook. And AI is treated as leverage, not a moat: the durable edge is operator judgment and experience applied with AI, not the tools alone.
Who is Stuart Chuang?
Cedarwind's founder. He built and scaled growth motions inside Intuit's Mailchimp, Google's Ads org, and McKinsey's growth practice, was the founder running GTM at an early-stage EdTech startup, and an engineer at TSMC before that.
Let's see what an AI-native GTM looks like on your funnel.
Thirty minutes on a screenshare. We pull up your site and your funnel, and I narrate what a cold visitor experiences. If there's nothing to fix, I'll say so. If there's real work, you'll know the shape of it by the end of the call.
or write · stuart@cedarwind.io · reply within two business days