About Cites X

Forty years of building brands, now software for founders

Cites X was built by an operator who has spent four decades taking products from garage to global market: video games, mega-brand IP at Hasbro and Mattel, Silicon Valley startups, hospitality, and an accelerator that took dozens of technology startups into the Chinese market every month. The lesson from all of it is simple. Founders do not just need PR. They need the brand architected first, and everything else flows downstream. Cites X turns that playbook into software.

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40 yrsBuilding brands and companies

23+Mega-brand franchises managed

~40/moN. European startups taken into China

35+Markets, in their own language

1998Built a social-media site before Twitter

The gap we lived

Right product, wrong visibility. Then we fixed it for a living.

Our first startup was a game company in 1992. Then in 1998 we built a social-media website in San Francisco, the first Twitter in all but name, and ran it for five years. The technology was right, the funding was right, people used it constantly. It never became famous enough, and it faded while a near-copy a decade later became a household name. A mobile streaming platform, years before Netflix streamed, taught the same lesson: right product, wrong visibility.

Then, managing the IP for Tonka, Monopoly, Hot Wheels and Matchbox at Hasbro and Mattel, the opposite was true: brand discipline was law, and the brand carried the market.
An accelerator put it to the test: taking around forty technology startups a month from Northern Europe into China, rebuilding each brand, message and go-to-market for a completely different language and culture.
The pattern never changed. Brand first. Everything downstream.

Why this is a platform, not a pitch

The system we always wished existed.

The catalyst was a PR analysis: one-sided, from someone who had never built a company, handed over with "good luck, go." No strategy, no next step, no system. A real PR launch costs fifty or sixty thousand dollars and a team. So we built the opposite. Answer a few questions, and the engine architects your brand strategy first, then carries it downstream into content, pitching, coverage and AI citations, step by step, telling you what to do next, in every market's own language. A seasoned operator's playbook, automated, for the founder with more ambition than budget.

How we work

The principles behind every engagement and every feature.

AI-augmented, human-led

Strategy and judgement stay senior and human. AI runs the production at a multiple of a traditional agency, so you pay for the work, not the overhead.

A fraction of agency cost

A full brand and PR operation for a fraction of a traditional agency. Paid plans start with a one-month trial, no fifty-thousand-dollar retainer, so a founder can afford to do it right.

Proof-first

Traceability, real coverage and AI citations, not vanity. Every claim is one you can show.

Global and local

Built for international reach, in each market's own language, not translated after the fact.

Who builds it

One builder, many industries, one craft

Cites X is led by a serial founder and operator who has built across gaming, global consumer franchises, technology and hospitality since the earliest days of the personal computer. He grew up around it, the son of an engineer who maintained the SR-71. He managed mega-brand IP at Hasbro and Mattel, co-founded and exited technology companies including a game engine sold to IBM, built restaurants, a destination dining brand and an accelerator in Asia, and developed real estate and immersive visualization before returning to software, where he began. The common thread, every time: take an asset and build the brand, the IP and the market around it.

Gaming to franchises to tech to hospitality IP at Hasbro and Mattel Multiple startups, multiple exits Accelerator: ~40 startups into China a month

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