About me
Hi! I’m Tommy.
I’m a London-based digital visibility consultant helping service businesses become easier to find, trust and choose.
Before doing this, I spent 11 years working in software and web engineering.
I learned how websites are built. Now I spend much more of my time thinking about a different question:
Why do some good businesses get noticed while others remain almost invisible?
The very compressed version
From building websites to helping businesses get noticed
First
Software and web engineering
Eleven years learning how websites, applications and the systems underneath them actually work.
Then
I started building businesses
Photography, music and my own websites gave me somewhere to test what makes people actually discover and choose something.
The useful clue
Good work can still be invisible
A polished website and a good service mean surprisingly little if the right customer never finds or trusts you.
Now
Digital visibility
Helping service businesses become easier to find, understand, trust and ultimately choose.
What changed
Building something good and getting people to care about it are completely different skills.
For most of my career, the job was straightforward in principle: make the software work well.
Once I started running businesses of my own, that stopped being enough.
I could make a website faster, cleaner and technically better. But none of that guaranteed anybody would find it. And even being found didn’t guarantee somebody would trust it enough to enquire.
A good business can be genuinely better than the competition and still lose because the customer never sees enough evidence to know it.
That’s the problem I became obsessed with.
My photography business, Snax.band and this consultancy itself now give me real places to test those ideas rather than leaving them inside an SEO tool or a spreadsheet.
What I care about
Useful marketing should make good businesses easier to choose.
Find what matters
I’d rather identify the handful of things likely to change the commercial outcome than deliver a giant checklist of technically correct recommendations.
Make the evidence visible
Being good at what you do is private information until reviews, examples, recommendations and other signals make it obvious to a stranger.
Actually implement it
Theoretical perfection is useless if a recommendation is too complicated, expensive or impractical to ever get shipped.
Elsewhere on the internet
Let’s connect
Professional
Marketing, business experiments and whatever I’m currently learning.
Photography
Tommy McDevitt Photography
My London portrait photography business and one of my live search experiments.
Newsletter
Protocol
Essays about attention, visibility, trust, business and making good work matter.
Experiment
Dental SEO London
A live experiment in whether extreme niche and location specificity can compete with much larger SEO businesses.