Who you'd actually be working with
The person who builds it
answers the phone.
Not an account manager relaying your question to someone you'll never meet. Not a junior learning on your budget. When you ask why something changed last Tuesday, you're asking the person who changed it — and you get the actual answer, in one message, the same day.
I’m a civil engineer by training. MEng at Birmingham, and a placement at AtkinsRéalis on major infrastructure before this. Acquisition gets built the same way anything else does that has to hold: specified, tested, and measured where it fails.
Sulaiman Ali
Founder · MEng · UK
The background
I'm an engineer
who does marketing.
That order matters, and it's the right way round. This is a marketing business — what I'm selling you is client acquisition, not software. The engineering is how it gets built, and it's the reason the thing behaves like a machine instead of a series of hunches.
An MEng teaches you one habit above all others: you don't get to have an opinion about why something failed. You instrument it, you find the part that's actually leaking, and you fix that part. Most marketing runs the other way round — a strong opinion, a rewrite, a hope, and no way of telling afterwards which change did anything.
So I build acquisition the way I was taught to build anything: define the unit, measure the stage that's losing it, change one thing, watch what moves. It's unglamorous and slower to talk about than a big creative idea. It's also why I can tell you which part of your funnel is broken rather than guessing at it in a proposal.
I grew up around this kind of customer, too — my father worked in construction, property and the trades. Quote cycles, crew scheduling, the narrow window where an interested buyer is still interested, the seasons that decide the year. I didn't learn service businesses from a case study.
On tooling, since it's the question everyone asks now: yes, I use modern automation and AI where they genuinely help, and they're a big part of why one person can run what used to need five. They're tools in the workshop. They aren't the offer, and I'm not going to sell you them.
Why this exists
Nobody diagnoses first.
That's the whole problem.
Every agency I've watched sell to a service business sells the one channel it happens to run. The cold email shop diagnoses a cold email problem. The ads shop diagnoses an ads problem. Both are sincere, and one of them is wrong, and the business owner pays to find out which.
I built WaveSignal to run both, specifically so that the first honest thing I can do is tell you which one your business actually needs — and say “neither, yet” when that happens to be true, which it sometimes is.
It costs me deals. Someone arrives certain they want ads, I tell them their buyer list is forty names long and ads would be lighting money on fire, and sometimes they go and buy ads from someone else anyway. That's fine. I'd rather lose that one than take it and watch it fail.
The whole business only works if the diagnosis is honest. The moment I start selling whatever I'd prefer to build, I'm just another shop with an opinion — and there are plenty of those already.
In a client's words
Mark Moore,
Helppeoplebuy.
Filmed on his own phone, quoted in full and unedited — including the parts I'd never write about my own work.
“His Meta campaign generated more leads than I've had before over a set time — definitely worth talking to if you're looking for qualified leads.”
Attendance figures stay off the page until the calendar export is on file.
His testimonial in full, unedited
“Sulaiman was very proactive from the very start, and he set up and ran my Meta ads campaign, the lead-generation piece of my customer acquisition. Unlike a lot of other marketers and agencies out there, he brought his engineering professionalism to the job — professional, smart, and quick to react when adjustments were needed. Most of all he gave me great confidence with his communication, efforts, and hard work. I was very impressed; his Meta campaign generated more leads than I've had before over a set time, and I'll be on to him again to progress my lead gen system. He's definitely worth talking to if you're looking for lead generation help and qualified leads.”
How it actually runs
One name on every part of it.
You speak to me
Scoping, building, running it, and the awkward conversation when something isn't working — same person, every time. Nothing gets translated on the way to you, and nothing gets softened on the way back.
I only take what I can run
There's a limit to how many builds one person can do properly at once, and I'd rather say no than take the work and run it thin. If the timing doesn't work, I'll tell you when it does.
Small on purpose
One operator is a deliberate choice, not a stage I'm trying to grow out of. It's what makes the accountability real — there's nobody else here to point at.
Talk to the personwho'd build it.
One short call to work out which channel your business needs — and whether either is the right move yet. No pitch until there's a diagnosis.