Michael Melen learned to build websites. Then he learned to make room.

Nine dollars a month is an awkward sum on which to found a business legend. It will barely finance lunch, and it makes a poor entrance at an investors’ dinner. For Michael Melen, it was enough to make the internet interesting in an entirely new way. His website, FunnyCities.com, collected amusing American place names. People visited. Advertisements earned money. A joke had acquired a business model.

Before SmartSites, before the conference appearances, before an agency needed department directors, there was this small piece of evidence that something he made could find an audience. The amount matters because it was so modest. Nobody needed to mistake it for a fortune. It was encouragement with a dollar sign attached.

His childhood experiments ran alongside those of his brother Alex, whose projects included MP3 websites. Michael helped. Building for the web offered an unusually direct education: make something, put it in front of people, discover whether anyone cares. A browser is a very inexpensive classroom, though its examinations can be merciless.

By nineteen, Michael had sold his first internet company. His early work also included digital media consulting for Disney and Budweiser. The distance between funny place names and household brands is considerable. The underlying task remained recognizable: get something in front of the people who might want it, then give them a reason to stay.

Two brothers, several jobs apiece

Michael attended Cornell University from 2008 to 2011. He completed his studies in three years and co-founded SmartSites with Alex in 2011. New Jersey supplied the setting. The brothers supplied the labor. The agency’s beginnings included office equipment, furniture and client calls, the little necessities that rarely survive into a founder’s polished introduction.

Alex had his own history in web hosting and advertising. Michael brought experience in search engine optimization and the practical work of getting websites made and noticed. Their careers met in a business that would put website design, paid advertising and organic search under one roof.

There is a temptation to turn a family company into a sentimental object. The interesting question is what the family actually builds together. SmartSites sold work that customers could inspect: a website, a campaign, a change in how often a business appeared when someone searched. Sibling familiarity might get a conversation started. It could hardly substitute for delivery.

In Michael’s account of his early career, he had written copy, designed graphics, debugged code, sold services and handled customers. That range gave him a view of the whole production. It also set up an important surrender: somebody else could become better at each piece. Competence, carried too proudly, can turn into a very elaborate job description from which there is no escape.

The customer needs the whole thing

His explanation for expanding beyond SEO is disarmingly practical. A small business needs more than one channel. A company that becomes easier to find still needs a useful destination for the visitor. Advertising needs a page worth paying to send people to. Existing customers need reasons to come back.

The service list grew accordingly. SmartSites added email and SMS marketing in 2021 and social media marketing in 2022. Its present organization includes separate specialists for search, paid media, email, social and web design. The work is divided among people; the customer’s problem does not politely divide itself in the same fashion.

Consider Air Duct Brothers, a New Jersey business Michael discussed in a 2024 interview. SmartSites helped with its name, logo, website, SEO and paid search. The reported results included more than fifty leads in the first month. It is a useful example because the starting point was so tangible: a business needed an identity online before it could benefit from being discovered there.

For a founder, this kind of work offers fewer opportunities for theatrical mystery than technology advertising sometimes suggests. The client wants inquiries. The team has to connect the pieces. A handsome website that sends nobody to the telephone can be admired at leisure, which is precisely the difficulty.

A map can become a ceiling

Michael’s first team was assembled online while he was still in college. Later came a New Jersey office. Eventually SmartSites returned to a fully remote model. In retrospect, the geography of the office had imposed a limit on hiring: the right person had to fit the job and the commute.

An agency may need a specialist in a particular advertising platform, a particular kind of account, a particular corner of search. Put all those requirements inside one local hiring radius and the list gets short. Remote work widened the list. The founder’s hometown no longer had to supply every specialist the business required.

That is a more interesting argument for distributed work than the usual photographs of laptops near swimming pools. A talent search is also a search problem. Change the area being searched and you change the possible answers. For someone who earns his living helping businesses get found, there is a pleasing symmetry.

In 2017, Michael was already described as leading operations for a team of more than sixty across three continents. Today the company describes a worldwide team of more than 370. Those snapshots belong to different moments, but together they show how early the business extended beyond the office’s walls. New Jersey remained a base; it did not have to be a boundary.

The ambition belonged to his employees, too

The more revealing limit was personal. Michael could be content with the business he had while an employee saw the same organization as too small for the career ahead. A founder’s comfortable present can become somebody else’s permanent waiting room.

Speaking with Jeff Frick in 2025, he recalled employees asking about the growth plan. They wanted the possibility of building teams and becoming managers. His response was to set an annual growth goal of thirty percent. That was a management intention, rather than a claim that every year would obediently produce the same result.

It changes the meaning of expansion. The familiar version is that the founder wants more and the staff must help obtain it. Here, staff ambition helped change the founder’s appetite. Growth could create places for capable people to go. A job could contain a future.

The distinction matters in a service business, where much of the value walks into meetings under somebody else’s name. Clients depend on specialists. Specialists need reasons to stay. A company cannot promise everyone an interesting career merely by handing out an interesting title.

At the 2026 UK SEO Summit, Michael’s agency-scaling session returned to those subjects: compensation linked to merit, leadership with less interference, and keeping talented employees through growth. The title advertised a revenue journey. The accompanying explanation concerned the organization required to sustain one. The figures might attract the room; the people have to do the work afterward.

“Really early on I realized all the best people wanted growth.”

Michael Melen · Work 20XX, 2025

Ten appearances, and the discipline of returning

SmartSites placed at No. 4,010 on the 2026 Inc. 5000. The company reported sixty percent revenue growth over the measured three-year period and a tenth consecutive appearance, beginning in 2017. One ranking gives a business a photograph. Repeated appearances begin to describe a habit.

Michael’s response was unusually restrained for an occasion designed to invite a celebratory adjective. He said he was “prouder of the consistency than of any single rank.” It is a revealing preference. An individual placing is a moment. Continuing to qualify requires the company to keep moving after the congratulatory post has disappeared down the feed.

There is no reason to turn an agency’s award into a measure of its founder’s entire life. It does, however, offer a useful external checkpoint. Inc. lists the founding year as 2011 and names both brothers in leadership. Fifteen years after the start, the family partnership is still visible in the formal record.

For the agency’s fifteenth anniversary in April 2026, Michael put his emphasis on the team and its concern for client results. His stated ambition for what comes next was similarly direct: continue helping clients grow as the digital environment changes. It leaves plenty of room for difficult decisions without requiring a new founding myth every spring.

A search specialist meets a moving target

The internet that paid for FunnyCities.com has changed its manners several times. Michael now speaks about AI and search as well as the operations of an agency. At State of Search in November 2023, his session addressed practical uses of ChatGPT across coding, content, graphics and research.

By December 2025, his published conference takeaways on generative engine optimization were concerned with human oversight, fresh information and conflicting measurements of AI search. He noted the uncertainty in available analytics. An industry selling visibility has good reason to be cautious when the instruments themselves are still being worked out.

That stance is useful precisely because the subject invites easy certainty. A new interface appears; the old anxieties report for duty. Will anyone find the business? What should it publish? Which work can be automated? The tools alter the questions’ details. They do little to remove the responsibility for an answer.

His 2025 State of Search session was framed around lessons from growing a thousand brands, covering several marketing channels. In 2026 he also joined Running Remote’s discussion of future teams alongside David Siegel of Glide and Beth White of MeBeBot, with Time Doctor’s Liam Martin moderating. Search strategy and workplace design increasingly share his speaking calendar.

Still partial to New Jersey

Away from that calendar, his listed interests include chess, hiking, soccer and travel. He has named Firefly and Dollhouse among his favorite shows. There is some pleasure in finding science fiction beside the spreadsheets: even an operations executive may occasionally prefer a universe whose rules were written by somebody else.

His attachment to New Jersey is explicit. So is his admiration for parents who immigrated to America and helped him through Cornell. The profile that emerges has both movement and a fixed point: international teams and conference trips, with a home state he has said he would choose again.

Perhaps the useful way to read Michael Melen’s career is through the jobs he has gradually allowed other people to do. First the website required its maker. Then the business required a team. Eventually that team required prospects of its own. Each step enlarged the task of the person who had begun by doing everything.

Nine dollars could encourage a young website builder. Keeping a company worth working for asks for a different kind of imagination: the ability to see what another person might become, and to leave enough room for it.