The long version.

I was born in Pittsburgh on January 28, 1996, on Super Bowl Sunday. The Steelers were actually in the game that year, and they lost. It does not mean anything, but this is a football town, so it is the kind of thing you grow up hearing about, and I have always thought it was funny. My mom's side is Italian. She came over from a small town in Lazio when she was 7, along with my grandma Connie and my grandfather Luigi. Luigi died of lung cancer in 1997, when I was 1, so I never really got to know him, but by every account he worked relentlessly, which runs in that whole side of the family.

My dad is a Pittsburgh guy who has spent his whole career in HVAC. Years later I found out that the grandfather I grew up with on his side was not my grandfather by blood, which makes Szymanski basically an adopted name. So I am at least half Italian through my mom, but I have no idea what my biological paternal grandfather actually was. The side I grew up with does not look Italian, and my dad very much does, so for all I know I am even more Italian than I think, or something else entirely. It is not a big deal, just one of those genuinely intriguing things, and it means my name could have been something completely different.

My parents are two of the hardest-working people I have ever known. My mom was back at work 2 weeks after she had me, and according to them I was a terrible baby who never slept. My sister Sara came along 3 years later, and she is my only sibling.

Grade school was St. Philip, a small Catholic school in Crafton, where I met Zach Mell, who is still my oldest friend. School came easy and I did well without trying very hard, but mostly I was an active kid. I spent every summer outside playing whatever the neighborhood was playing, football, ball hockey, wiffleball, basketball, all of it. I had plenty of friends and a lot of energy to burn.

We were raised Catholic, but we were not really churchgoers. We were the kind of Catholics who were too busy working to make it to Mass most weeks. Our church was Rea's Restaurant, my Grandma Connie's diner in Coraopolis, and on Sunday mornings that is exactly where you would find us.

My mom ran that diner, and I basically grew up inside it. I was there in a playpen as a baby, and the second I was big enough to carry a plate I was working. It was open 6 days a week, and most weekends and all summer I was down there, sometimes at 6 a.m. I started busing and setting tables, then ran the register, then ended up in the kitchen. As a kid it felt awful. Looking back, it is probably the best thing that ever happened to me. It taught me how to work, how to get up early, and how to talk to anyone who walked through the door. It also made me close with my mom, my sister, and especially my grandma. I would keep working there in one form or another for the better part of twenty years, all the way through high school and college.

The summer before high school I got sick of being the short, chubby kid. I was around 171 pounds and 5 foot 5 at 14. So I swapped pop for water and fried chicken for grilled chicken, started lifting weights in a little playhouse my dad had built, and showed up to Bishop Canevin a different person. I am 30 now and I weigh about what I did before that summer. That change stuck for life.

School had always come easy, and that started compounding fast in high school. A core group of us, maybe ten kids including Zach, had already been bused over to Canevin during eighth grade at St. Philip to take their math and science classes. So we walked into freshman year already a step ahead. I was in Algebra II with juniors and Chemistry with sophomores from day one. I was not the smartest one in that group, honestly I was probably on the lower end of it, but being inside a group of kids who were ahead of the curve gave me momentum I never lost. That was the first version of what I do now: build rapport with people quickly and easily, across grades and circles.

High school is the age when everyone starts drinking and experimenting, and that was just never me. My mom had told me not to, and somehow she said it in exactly the right way, enough to land without making me want to rebel. It was barely a peer-pressure thing because my own friend group did not do it either, so I never really had to say no. If anything I think I got a little respect for it, maybe some quiet envy. Being the kid who was not chasing that stuff while everyone else was figuring it out put me ahead in a maturity sense too, and that is part of why high school ended up shaping me more than college did.

I played baseball for years and bowled all four, captained the bowling team my senior year, and quit baseball before senior year to play more ball hockey. I had started playing organized ball hockey at 14, in early 2010, at the Boys and Girls Club in Carnegie, and by 2013 I had moved up to Team Pittsburgh, a serious program. It is the one thing that has stayed constant through every era of my life since. Through all of it I was still down at Rea's most weekends, the way I had been since I was a kid. Most of high school was honestly pretty easy. I graduated 11th in my class without ever really studying, never reading the assigned books in English, running on raw intuition and the minimum effort needed to hold my trajectory. I took a stack of AP and College-in-High-School classes (officially through the University of Pittsburgh), and the truth is, those classes were graded a lot easier in a high school classroom than they would have been at Pitt itself. If I had brought the same amount of effort once I got there, I would have failed.

The other thing about high school is that I still know almost everyone from it. Small school, 12 years of overlap with people I went all the way through St. Philip and Canevin with, and most of them stayed in Pittsburgh. I see a lot of them digitally and a fair number in person. College could not have been more different. I did not really make any friends there. Maybe one or two people I talked to in class who I might still recognize, but nothing real. The high school friendships are the ones that took.

By senior year I was not picturing some big departure. Home life was good, I did not want to leave Pittsburgh, and I did not want a fat student-loan tab to pay off. I was not getting recruited for sports and my grades were good but not scholarship-good, so I went the cheap, close, sensible route. I only applied to one school, the University of Pittsburgh. Honestly, a lot of that decision was just that Zach was going there too. We had been in the same classes for years, and I wanted that to keep going.

I started at the University of Pittsburgh in 2014, and it was basically an extension of high school. I commuted, 15 minutes from my parents' house, still working weekends at Rea's, and never really wanted to be there. I went into the engineering school chasing a computer engineering degree, because that is what I assumed a smart, technical kid was supposed to do. The one thing that actually stuck from that first year was a simple website I built in an Engineering Seminar class, plain HTML and CSS. I did not know it yet, but that was the start of everything.

The rest of it went badly. My first semester I posted a 1.234 GPA and landed on academic probation, which I had honestly forgotten about until I went back and looked. I was not a studier, I did not want to be there, and a lot of those years are genuinely a blur to me now. Zach took a lot of the same classes and rode down with me every day, and he carried me through more of it than I would like to admit.

I bounced from computer engineering to computer science and finally to information science, failing a couple of classes along the way. If I had just started in information science I could have finished in 3 years. Switching to it felt like a cop-out at the time, and honestly it kind of was, but it is the thing that got me out. I graduated in 2018 with about $26,000 in loans, skipped my own commencement, and paid the whole thing off in under a year.

Ball hockey kept going the whole time. In the summer of 2015 I tried out for the U20 USA national team in Marlton, New Jersey, and did not make it. That was the year I accepted it was going to be a serious amateur sport for me, not a career, and I am glad it went that way. In the spring of 2017 I broke my left thumb on a slash while I was shooting, which meant surgery and pins. Neither one kept me off the floor for long.

The important part of college had nothing to do with my classes. Somewhere in the middle of it I found Maxx Chewning and then Gary Vaynerchuk, and something clicked that school never did. They were building their own things in public and documenting the whole process, and I wanted that far more than I wanted a degree. I was not a prodigy starting a channel or shipping an app in my room. I just knew, quietly and certainly, that I was going to build something of my own, and the idea would not let go.

I also met Amanda in 2016. Mutual friends set us up, and we were dating 11 days later. I was 20 and I was not looking for a fling, I was already looking for a wife. I had not had a serious relationship since high school and I knew what I wanted. The next person I met happened to be the most kind, caring, genuinely good person I had ever been around, and that was that. She has been the center of everything since.

The other thing that started mattering toward the end of college was a job. The summer before my senior year I took an internship at RE/MAX Select Realty, mostly to get real experience. By the time I graduated it had turned into a full-time role, and it ended up mattering more than the degree did. More on that in a minute.

I started as an intern at RE/MAX Select Realty the summer before my senior year, and they hired me full time after graduation. It is still the only real, traditional job I have ever had. I climbed fast: intern to digital marketing strategist to director of marketing in about 2 years. At first I loved being out of school and doing real work for a real company.

That job is also where I first met WordPress, and it is hard to overstate how much of my whole career traces back to one offhand suggestion in that office. I needed to build a website for something I was working on, and the developers sitting next to me told me to try ASP.NET. I tried, and it was awful. Then they said try WordPress. I tried it, found Elementor not long after, and that combination cracked the whole thing open. Every WordPress-adjacent thing I have done since, the client sites, the content, the community, the agency, traces back to that conversation.

About a year and a half in, after climbing as fast as I had, I realized I was being worked to the bone for the amount of pull I actually had. There were quarterly events to produce and one huge annual awards ceremony, basically a full-blown ball for the agents, and the production around it ate my nights. I would be at the office until midnight with the COO building over-engineered PowerPoint presentations, figuring out how to make that software do things nobody had any business doing, all so the show would pop. It was performative and completely unnecessary. The pay was fine, around 50 or 60 grand, but the industry felt fake and the work felt hollow. I knew I could do all of this on my own. It was sucking my soul dry, and I am bad at hiding that. I resigned at the end of January 2020.

The writing had been on the wall a lot earlier than the actual resignation, though. Around May 2019, while I was still climbing, I got the itch. I had figured out that I actually knew things at a pretty young age, and I felt like I had something worth saying. So I started filming dumb little videos in my car about business and social media, random tips and thoughts. If you scroll back far enough on my channel, that is where it starts. That same year I went deep on personal finance because of Dave Ramsey and people like him, and I funneled everything I could into a Roth IRA and brokerage accounts. Low expenses, living at home, a decent salary. I was stacking cash, and even though I would not have called it this at the time, I was building my exit.

I resigned from RE/MAX at the end of January 2020, and a few weeks later COVID shut the whole world down. The timing was bizarre, and honestly it could not have been much better. I was still living at my parents' house with almost no expenses, so I had runway, and suddenly everyone had time on their hands. My family did not panic the way a lot of people did, and that helped.

I want to be honest about where I was when I left. I did not walk away because I was broke. I had a decent salary, savings, retirement accounts I had been funneling into, and almost no expenses because I was still at home. I left because I was dying inside, not because I was struggling. That distinction matters, because the version of going independent I lived through was not the dramatic "I had to make this work" story. It was, "I have runway, I have skills, let me try a lot of stuff and see what sticks." That comfort is what made the next few years possible. It is also probably why they stretched on as long as they did.

So I tried everything. I had Fueled By Progress running as a long-form podcast, with guests coming into a shed in my parents' garage to record in person. Amanda and I had AM In The PM going at the same time, also recorded in person, and we got somewhere around 80 episodes deep before it ended. I went hard on livestreaming at night to basically nobody. I attempted a Fueled By Progress apparel and community angle. I spun up a real estate property-management thing briefly that never went anywhere. I read everything I could find on personal finance, business, and content. It was the cliched "try things in your 20s" decade, and I actually did it.

Underneath the experiments, my actual paid work was FindIT Tech, building websites for clients. I had real clients and I did real work for them, but the gap between how much I was learning and how much I was earning never really closed. I built a lot of skill and not nearly enough business.

I overcomplicated everything along the way. I set up something like 6 different LLCs, one for every idea, including a podcast that earned nothing, because I did not realize you could just run multiple things under one company. Zach and I even started a real estate company that never got off the ground because we had no capital and just got excited. I went so wide so fast that I learned an enormous amount, but I would not recommend the way I did it. None of it was a disaster. A lot of it was just wasted motion.

Through all of it, ball hockey stayed. In April 2021 I joined the National Ball Hockey League, first with the Pittsburgh Pioneers and then the Pittsburgh Guardians, where I still play, a forward who shoots left and wears number 11.

The realization that I had to actually focus on making money took years to land. It took getting engaged, then married, and eventually having a kid before I could fully accept that the point of a business is to make money, and that I am good enough to do it. Confidence, purpose, direction, and cutting the distractions. None of that was here yet, and I look back at this whole stretch and genuinely wonder how I made it through.

Through all of it, the most important thing in my life had nothing to do with the businesses. Amanda and I had been together since 2016, and we never broke up, not once. We just grew up together. We went on cruises with my family, I helped her get her driver's license and her first credit card, we ran AM In The PM as a two-person show, and year by year she went from a college girlfriend to the person everything else was really for.

In September 2021 we bought her childhood home. Her parents were moving and needed to sell, we needed a place, and they gave us a real deal on it, a good price and a low mortgage to start our life on. It meant a lot to her to stay in the house she grew up in instead of starting over somewhere new. It probably meant just as much to our cat, Minnie, who was old enough by then that not having to learn a new house was a real kindness. The timing was serendipitous, and I have always appreciated it.

It had the same bones, but we made it ours. I spent months gutting and rebuilding the place, inside and out, and filmed the entire thing as a 67-episode YouTube series called Our First Home. Demo, painting every wall and ceiling, laying luxury vinyl plank through most of it, electrical and overhead lighting, running the network, tearing out an old in-wall AC unit, taking down trees in the yard, redoing the basement, and building out the studio I still record in. I am not secretly a contractor. I just watched a lot of YouTube and was not afraid to try, and my dad, who has been in the trades his whole life, helped me through the hard parts. By the time we officially moved out of my parents' house in early 2022, I had turned into a proper homeowner.

It was rewarding and I am proud of it, and I never want to do it again. That is the honest version. It is also where, on March 4, 2022, I proposed to Amanda. We were filming an episode of AM In The PM in the spare bedroom that is now my studio, paneling on the walls and carpet on the floor, and I figured it was a good way to capture the moment. It was a weird proposal. The ring did not even fit, because she had sized it wrong, and she had no idea it was coming. That turned out to be the last episode we ever filmed. We did not plan it that way, we just never recorded another one.

At the end of 2022 I worked my last shift at Rea's, and the sale closed a few weeks later. I had been there since I was a kid, and honestly I was happy when we sold it. Everyone was getting older and moving on, and it was simply the right time. Bittersweet, but right. Being who I am, I filmed a surprise 90-minute retrospective on the whole thing and put it on my channel.

We got married on October 28, 2023, at The Chadwick outside Pittsburgh. It was a beautiful day, all our friends and family, and the venue is gone now, closed for good less than a year later. The part nobody would guess is that I basically planned it. Amanda and her family made the big calls, but I ran the logistics like a project: the guests, the gifts, the endless back-and-forth, all of it funneled through me. We honeymooned in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. Amanda took my name, we combined our finances, and just like that we were a single unit, two people pointed in the same direction.

By the end of 2023 something shifted, though not in the way it probably looked from the outside. I had been putting myself out there for years already. I had run livestreams to basically nobody for a long time, talking into a camera whether anyone showed up or not. What changed was the focus. On December 8, 2023, I did a livestream called "WTF is happening in the WordPress community?" and it was the first time I aimed all of it squarely at what I actually did for a living: the people, the industry, the business of building websites, instead of just the tools I happened to use. That stream kicked off the whole run. It got people to notice me, pulled me into the community, and pushed me to go deeper. I decided to build real authority around this, and I went all in. More livestreams, more videos, trying to earn some rapport.

I also simplified my name. I had always had the channel, but I went from Mark Joseph Szymanski to just Mark Szymanski, because the longer version was a mouthful and a hassle.

The WordPress community gave me a lot: mentors, an audience, and a real sense of belonging. I went to my first WordCamp US in Portland in 2024, crossed 5,000 subscribers, and sold the biggest project I had ever done, $12,488, which showed me what was actually possible.

What made all of it possible is a skill I had been quietly building since the diner and those older-kid classrooms: I build trust and rapport with people fast. Not in a slick, closing-the-sale way. The opposite. I am honest to a fault and I will tell almost anyone almost anything about myself, and that is exactly why it works. It is genuinely one of the best things I do, and the WordPress world is where I found out how far it could carry me.

Inside of about two years I was, by small-pond standards, everywhere. I turned up on what felt like every show in the space. Matt Medeiros brought me onto The WP Minute, where I co-hosted early on. I was a regular on Kevin Geary's channel, on WP Tonic, in Stephanie Hudson's group, and on a long list of others. Kevin in particular taught me an enormous amount about how to actually build, and pushed my thinking from Elementor toward something more serious and developer-minded, and he and I co-launched WP Townhall together in 2024. There is a guest-appearances playlist on my channel with almost a hundred of these, basically every video I showed up in on someone else's channel.

I ran it the other way too. I brought guests onto my own channel and livestreams, which is its own kind of rapport-building: you learn a lot about someone by handing them your audience for an hour. One of the most unique versions was Bridge Builders. Maddy Eastwood came up with the idea and pitched me on it, and the concept was simple and a little different: take two competing ways of building, mostly different WordPress page builders, put two people who each swore by one of them together, and actually talk through the differences. We started the first episode on April 25, 2024, and eventually brought Brendan O'Connell into it as well. It was a good run, and people liked it because it was genuinely different. None of this pulled huge numbers, but every appearance and every guest cross-pollinated an audience and built another real relationship.

But even while all of that was happening, it was starting to feel small. I had shown up late, and the truth was that only a small pond of people cared about that specific content. The writing was on the wall earlier than I wanted to admit.

What was impressive about it was the velocity, not the volume. I came out of nowhere. In under two years I went from quietly building websites to a name that got brought up, invited in, and put on panels. It is not a huge pond, and I want to be precise about which part of it I mean. Inside the tighter WordPress community, the people who are actually tapped in, I got really well known, fast. People saw me everywhere. The random person watching an Elementor tutorial who is not plugged into any of that would have no idea who I am, and that is a different audience entirely. But in the circle that mattered to me, most of it came down to the rapport thing. People trusted me and liked talking to me, so I got into rooms.

The clearest example was the kind of room you usually do not get into that fast. At WordCamp US in Portland in 2025, Anne McCarthy got three of us a sit-down with Matt Mullenweg, Mary Hubbard, and several other Automatticians. It was me, Christian Makoa, and Michael Cunningham, three guys in our twenties, and we used it to make one point as plainly as we could. WordPress is not dying, but it is not growing, and there are almost no young people left in it. We basically asked what the plan was to fix that. I do not think it landed. Nothing actionable came out of it, and I walked out fairly sure there was not really a plan. These are all good people and I have nothing bad to say about any of them. That was just the honest read in the room.

That meeting put words to something I had felt all year. WordPress is not dying. It is enormous, it is tried and true, and it is still genuinely useful. It also is not growing, and a thing that stops growing stops being exciting no matter how big it is. The community skews a lot older than people like to admit, and I was almost always the youngest person in the room. There is real wisdom in being around people further down the road, and I have always sought that out, but it is not a sign of where the energy is going. A lot of that world is building the same way it always has, right as AI is about to force a reckoning most of it has not seen yet. I say all of that as generalizations, and not to insult anyone. It is just what I watched happen.

Here is the part I have to be honest about, because it is the whole point. At most a few thousand people actually cared about the inside-baseball I was making, and almost none of them were ever going to pay me for it. I was too deep in the community side of WordPress to earn real money from it, and I was doing it during the exact years I got married, took on a mortgage, and was fully responsible for myself. As a short-term return on two years of relentless work, it was close to a dead end. It was not a dead end as a person, though. It taught me how to handle an audience and how to take criticism, which I had never really had to do. The moment your content gets opinionated you start having conversations with people who do not think like you, a lot of them behind anonymous profiles, and you learn fast which pushback is worth taking and which is just noise.

I built real relationships in there and I am grateful for them. Some of them have naturally cooled since, and that is not bitterness. It is just what happens as you change and the people around you do not, or you grow in different directions. I was a lot like those people for a while, and then I was not. Not every relationship evolves with you, and that is okay.

By 2025 I had mostly accepted that it could not last. What finally forced the issue was a year I spent getting on airplanes.

2025 left a mark on me before it did anything else, literally. On February 1st I took a backhand to the face in a pickup game and got 7 stitches between my eyebrows, plus a tetanus shot the same day. I was back on the floor 4 days later in a visor, put up a goal and 3 assists, and the visor has stayed on. That is about as honest a picture of how I am wired as anything.

If I had to summarize 2025, it was the year of travel and the year everything started to shift. I traveled more than I had in the rest of my life combined. It started the year before at my first WordCamp US in Portland, and then I ran the whole circuit: CloudFest in Germany, my first time out of the country, PressConf in Arizona, WordCamp US again, CloudFest in Miami. I went as a media partner and basically speed-ran the entire creator-at-events thing. I also spoke in public for the first time, kept posting a short video every single day, crossed half a million career views, officiated my sister's wedding, and met a guy named Neville Millar at one of these events who, almost by accident, got me into mindfulness and meditation.

The connections were genuinely great and the people were good, mostly folks who had been in the WordPress world a long time. But the honest math was brutal. The return on all that travel was atrocious. I made relationships and almost no money, and I knew that with my actual skill set I could earn far more just sitting in my office putting out videos. That was the real lesson of the year. The travel showed me where my time is actually worth something, and it was the catalyst that finally made it undeniable. As much as the WordPress run had given me, it could not continue.

The hardest part was admitting it, because the reason to stay was always the people. I cannot walk away, I would tell myself, I have all these friends here. Eventually it clicked that making a career decision to protect friendships was irresponsible to my family. I am glad I saw it when I did. If I had kept going, the math never would have worked, and it had to.

By the back half of the year my finances were getting tight, and we had a son due in May 2026. That pressure made the call for me. All year my feed had been full of AI, automation, n8n, Claude Code, and I had been watching from the sidelines. So I stopped watching and built something. My first real agentic workflow was for a recruiting company: scrape candidate data and rank each person against the job and their own background, then hand back scored shortlists. I did not even get paid for it, but building it cracked something open. For the first time I could see exactly what was now possible. I landed on the stance I still hold: I am not the AI hype guy and I am not the AI doom guy. This technology is powerful, it is not going back in the bottle, and I am the realist standing in the middle of it.

It also forced a harder change in how I think. I had gotten deep into a world of best-practices perfectionism, the belief that every line of code has to be flawless or you have failed. It is a great way to feel righteous and a terrible way to make a living. Watching people simply build things that worked and made money, it clicked that to actually be an entrepreneur I had to stop obsessing over tools, stop second-guessing, and point everything at one thing: making something valuable and getting paid for it. Climbing out of that perfectionist mindset was one of the harder and more important things I have done.

I rebranded my service company while I was at it. I had always hated the old name, FindIT Tech. It had IT in it and I am not an IT guy, and I never wanted to say it out loud. I landed on Motive11. 11 is my number, and motive is the whole point: your motivation, your momentum, the reason you keep going. It is an extension of me the same way Fueled By Progress is, and it is the first version of the business I have actually been proud to put my name behind.

The scrappiest thing I did came straight out of being low on cash. In a single evening I used AI to build a course out of everything I knew about WordPress and AI and how to position an agency, and I pre-sold it to 20-some people at $49 before a single lesson existed. It was the first time I ever directly asked my audience for money, and it worked well enough to fund actually building it. That is the most founder thing I have ever done.

All of this was under real pressure. By November the businesses were not throwing off enough for me to pay myself. Amanda and I had started trying for a kid that summer, lost an early pregnancy, and then in the fall found out it was a boy. We named him Nolan, and suddenly everything I was building had a deadline and a reason.

2026 opened in a hole. In January, stressed about money with a baby weeks away, I pulled $5,000 out of my Roth IRA. Around the same time I launched that course for real through Modern Builders Society, the community I am building. Scared and shipping at the same time, which is the honest texture of this whole stretch. My family also threw me a surprise party for my 30th that month, which I genuinely did not see coming.

Then on Mother's Day, my son was born, and it was not the gentle version. Amanda was in the hospital for days, and he eventually had to come by C-section because he would not come on his own. They pulled him out around 9 p.m. and we did not hear crying, we heard an alarm. He was not breathing. He had aspirated meconium, so they rushed him to the NICU and put him on oxygen, and he spent 4 days in there. He is healthy now, and I have never been more grateful for anything in my life, but it was a lot.

Becoming a father changed the math on everything. There is a weight and a motivation now that was not there before, and at the same time I am working less, because I am home helping Amanda and learning how to take care of him. It is recalibrating me toward what actually matters. These days the work is really me plus AI: I lean into my personal brand and my own projects, with Motive11 as the service company behind the client work. It all runs on trust, and trust comes from showing my real thinking, the wins and the losses.

Some things have not changed and probably never will. I still play ball hockey two or three times a week, still number 11, still shooting left, and the full version of that, the teams, the seasons, the scars, lives over on mjs11.com. I have also still never had a single drink of alcohol in my life, a counter that has been running since the morning I was born. Those are the constants underneath everything else.

If there is one thread through all of it, it is that I have mostly been defined by what I did not do. I did not drink, did not party, did not blow up my life when it would have been easy to. That same restraint is why I think in decades instead of weeks, why I will not trade my name for a quick win, and why I treat AI as a tool to get ahead of instead of a thing to fear. I registered Republican at 18 and moved to Independent by 2020, mostly because I decided most of the noise is not worth my energy. I would rather build something than argue about it. The version of success I actually want is not a number. It is being a good husband and father with enough freedom over my time to be there for it.