About
Jonathan Zelaya, Founder of SMPL Strategies
SMPL does not sell AI hacks. We rebuild the fundamentals so AI systems can understand and recommend your business.
The founder story
A founder who came up doing the work itself: signing the docs, hauling the junk, building the sites. Now he builds the tools that let local operators own their presence instead of renting it.
He was the customer first.
Jonathan didn't come to this from marketing. He came from the labor side of the exact businesses SMPL now serves: a loan signing agent at kitchen tables, walking people through the biggest financial moments of their lives; a junk hauler who built his own local service business and still runs it; a self-taught builder of websites and systems. He worked the real jobs local operators work, and he saw the same thing everywhere he looked. The people doing the actual work were getting the least honest treatment from the companies selling them "digital presence." SMPL exists because someone who was the customer built it.
The thesis is ownership, not renting.
He watched the standard agency and platform model rent people their own presence: hold the site hostage, charge monthly forever, hand back nothing the day you stop paying. He built SMPL to be the deliberate opposite. You own your site, your domain, your accounts, your data. That's why "Own Your Site" is more than a product to him. It's the whole thesis. It's built for the people who built their towns: the local, family-run, blue-collar operators who show up and do the work, and who deserve to actually own the thing they pay for. Not the Fortune 500. The guy who fixed your roof and can't figure out why he doesn't come up when someone searches for a roofer.
The honest broker is how he actually runs.
In his own service business, his instinct was to point customers to their free options first. If you're genuinely the better call, you get the work anyway. If you're not, you shouldn't have it. That instinct, the one that costs money in the short run to earn trust in the long run, is what SMPL is made of. He won't sell a shortcut, because he knows there isn't one: the trust an AI system needs before it will cite a business as an answer has to be earned over time, through real-world evidence. He tells clients that plainly, the honest timeline and what they're actually buying, even when the honest answer makes the sale harder. Real numbers only, every claim traced to a source, nothing manufactured. To him, credibility is the entire moat.
He proved it on his own business first.
Before it was something he sold, he ran it on a business of his own. He watched it fail to show up in AI answers, built the tools to understand why, and applied them to his own listing. It's already producing real results. He names what works accurately, doesn't inflate it, and holds himself to the same bar he holds the work to.
About SMPL