The long version.
The short bio lives on the home page. This one's for people who want the actual story.
I'm Dan McDermott. I live in San Diego. For the last fifteen years I've been some version of a marketing strategist, copywriter, coach, and operator — usually all of those at once.
The throughline isn't a job title. It's a habit: helping people figure out what they're actually trying to say, and then helping them say it. That's what I did at the United Nations, what I did writing grants for cleantech companies, what I did coaching marketers at Kopywriting Kourse, what I did running marketing as CMO at Vouris, and what I do now running Stick & Grow.
Tufts, UCL, and the United Nations.
I studied international relations at Tufts as an undergrad and then went straight to UCL in London for a master's in public policy. I thought I was going to work on international development for the rest of my life.
After grad school I joined UNRWA — the UN agency for Palestinian refugees — where I spent about a year writing for an organization whose work was constantly being described in someone else's words. That was the first time I really understood that writing is how complicated work gets funded and protected. The rest of my career is a footnote to that lesson.
Grant writer for cleantech and mining.
I left the UN to work at Remote Energy Solutions, a boutique consultancy doing cleantech for the mining industry. My job title said market analyst; my actual job was writing grant applications and proposals for projects that would otherwise have been invisible to the people funding them.
From there I joined 8 Circle Energy, an LED lighting consultancy, doing similar work in a different vertical. Three years of writing things that get funded teaches you a specific skill: explaining technical work to people who don't want to read about technical work.
Independent consulting.
I started Stick & Grow as a side project in 2011 and turned it into a full-time consultancy by 2013. For the next several years I did positioning, copy, and content work for a long list of clients — chatbot campaigns for Disney, Marvel, and Ben & Jerry's; brand voice work for NOCD; nonprofit campaigns for UNRWA and USAID; landing pages and email work for fintech companies including Forex.com and FXCM.
This is the era when I learned that the work clients actually want isn't the work they ask for. They ask for a sales page. What they need is for someone to tell them what business they're in.
Head Copy Coach.
In 2018, Neville Medhora hired me as the Head Copy Coach at Kopywriting Kourse. For three years I coached more than a thousand marketers, founders, and copywriters — and co-hosted weekly Office Hours with Neville every Friday.
I also wrote a significant chunk of the public blog, ran the program's email marketing and sales campaigns (including the annual Black Friday push), and built the program's cold sales email course. Many of the clients I'm proudest of helping — Ahrefs, The Hustle, YETI, Alpha Paw — came through this work.
If the first half of my career was about writing for organizations, this is when I started teaching other people how to write for theirs.
Chief Marketing Officer.
I joined Vouris — a B2B sales consultancy that builds repeatable sales processes for early-stage SaaS companies — as their CMO in 2021. For three years I owned the full marketing function: brand, website, content, email, demand gen, partnerships, and sales enablement. I managed a small remote team of writers, designers, and video editors.
The work I'm most proud of from that period was building a productized sales-copywriting training that ended up being delivered to 50+ SaaS sales teams, including Hyros, Monograph, Review Wave, RocketReach, WeTravel, Storewise, Proven, CyberReady, and Zen Healthcare IT. I trained their reps on every written sales motion — cold email, follow-ups, objection handling, proposal language.
I also co-designed the weekly webinar engine that became Vouris's primary acquisition channel and a productized training we sold to client sales teams.
AI-enabled content.
I left Vouris in 2024 to relaunch Stick & Grow as an AI-enabled content studio. The thesis is simple: a single experienced operator with good taste and a strong stack of AI workflows can now do what used to take a small agency. That's what I'm building, and what I'm writing about.
Most of my current work falls into two buckets: helping solo experts productize and position their practices (the Signature Offer Sprint), and building out content engines for clients who want the system installed rather than just designed.
I also do stand-up comedy, mostly in San Diego, mostly badly, occasionally well enough to feel like it might one day be worth something. It's the only part of my career that has nothing to do with the rest of it, which is exactly why I keep doing it.