Written by Gabriel, in the first person, because a founder story in the third person is a press release.
Chapter one
I trained as a physics engineer, which is a strange way into marketing
My degree is in physics engineering, from one of Brazil's top universities. Nothing in that program was about advertising. What it was about was building a model of something you cannot see directly, then testing the model against a measurement and being honest when the measurement disagrees with you.
That turned out to be the entire job. Most of what goes wrong in a paid media account is not a creative problem. It is someone believing a number that is not measuring what they think it measures.
Chapter two
The first budget I ran was not mine, and the stakes were public
Before any of this was a career, I was the marketing director of one of the largest robotics teams in the Americas. Sponsors, deadlines, a real audience, and a team that had built something that either got attention or did not.
Then came product marketing at Brazilian edtech companies — where the thing you are selling is a decision a family thinks hard about, and no amount of clever positioning survives a weak offer. Two very different rooms, one lesson: marketing does not create value, it finds the people for whom the value is already obvious.
Chapter three
Then I spent three years in San Francisco spending other people's money
For more than three years I worked as a marketing specialist for Silicon Valley startups, based in San Francisco, running acquisition budgets for venture-funded companies across the United States and Brazil. The job was to take investor money and turn it into customers, on a scoreboard that updated daily and did not care how the strategy deck looked.
That environment teaches arithmetic, not vocabulary. What a customer is actually worth. Which keyword is quietly draining the month. Why a campaign that looks excellent in the dashboard is losing money in the bank account. And how much of this industry is performance for the client rather than performance for the business.
Chapter four
Three things moved the number. Everything else was decoration.
Measurement first. If the conversion signal is wrong, the algorithm optimizes toward the wrong person and keeps doing it, efficiently, forever. Most accounts I open are counting form loads instead of qualified leads.
The page, not the ad. You can double a result without touching a campaign, just by fixing where the click lands. Traffic into a weak page is a leak, not a test.
Patience with the math, impatience with the waste. Cutting a losing campaign in week two is worth more than a brilliant headline in week ten.
Chapter five
What small businesses were being sold looked nothing like that
Same channels. A fraction of the rigor. And a pricing model that quietly points the wrong way: a percentage of ad spend.
Think about what that rewards. The agency's revenue rises when your budget rises. Telling you to spend less is telling themselves to earn less. Nobody in that story is a villain — the incentive just leans against you on every decision, every day.
Add a twelve-month term, add ad accounts owned by the agency so leaving means starting over, and you have a business that does not have to be good in order to be profitable.
An agency paid on your spend is not neutral about your spend. The reports, the QBRs, the dashboard logins — all of it is downstream of that one fact.
Chapter six
So in 2024 I built the opposite, on purpose
Reyter started in Brazil in 2024 and now serves clients in Brazil, in Portuguese, and across the United States, in English. Same method in both markets.
Flat monthly fee, published on the page. Accounts in your name from day one. Month to month, ten days' notice either way, and the terms public before the first call. None of that is generosity — it is what is left after you remove every incentive that is not "make this work." If I tell you to cut spend in half, it costs me nothing, which is the only condition under which that advice is worth anything.
Chapter seven
Why only five new clients a month
Because that is what one senior operator can run properly, and I would rather say that out loud than pretend the calendar is infinite. It is not a countdown timer or a fake waiting list. When the month is full, we say the month is full and you wait or you go elsewhere.
The trade is deliberate. You get fewer available slots; you also get the person who read your account, not a summary of it.
