About Deadpan Labs
The agency that tests on its own brands first.
Deadpan Labs is a small ecommerce growth agency in Miami, Florida, founded in 2026 and working remote-first. We get Shopify and DTC brands found — ranked in search and named in the AI answers buyers now ask first — and we build the platform the business runs on. It is run lean on purpose: you talk to the person doing the work.
There is no pitch theater here and no inflated deck. Deadpan Labs has no signed client work yet, and says so on its own site rather than implying otherwise. What it can show instead is first-party: one of its own products went from zero to more than 900 organic downloads with no ad spend, and the company runs itself on the same platform it sells.
Last updated 2026-08-22 · Deadpan Labs · Miami, FL
01
One team, modern stack
The people who write the strategy also ship the code and run the campaigns. Your dashboard is the platform we run ourselves, not somebody else's tools stitched together.
02
Honest scoping
Before any commitment you get what it takes, what it costs, and what the first milestone looks like. If we're not the right fit, we say so.
03
Found, not just shipped
A build isn't done when it deploys — it's done when buyers find it. Every project ships with the search and AI-search work attached, not sold afterward.
Why it is built this way
Three findings decided the shape of this company.
A company’s structure is an argument about where work goes wrong. Ours is built around three things other people measured, each attributed to the organization that measured it:
- 1 · The click is being absorbed by the answer. The Pew Research Center tracked 900 U.S. adults across 68,879 Google searches in March 2025 and found they clicked a traditional search result on 8% of visits where an AI summary appeared, against 15% of visits where none did. Shipping a product without a plan for being named is shipping into a channel that is getting quieter. That is why marketing is attached to the build here and not sold afterward.
- 2 · Being cited runs through the same surface as ranking. Semrush, studying 5,000 keywords and more than 150,000 citations, found Perplexity's cited domains overlap Google's organic top ten by more than 91% and its cited URLs by 82%, with Google AI Overviews reusing roughly 86% of the same domains. Whether an engine can read your product is settled by how the page was built. That is why the same people write the code and read the search data.
- 3 · Adding another subscription is rarely the fix. Zylo's 2026 SaaS Management Index puts the average company at 305 SaaS applications with license utilization at 54%, and BetterCloud's 2026 State of SaaS report found only 56% of the applications organizations use carry IT approval. That is why we build the platform rather than reselling a stack — and why we run our own company on it before asking anyone else to.
None of that entitles anyone to promise you a ranking or an AI recommendation, and we do not. It explains why the work is organized the way it is, which is a different and more useful claim.
The facts
Everything a buyer usually has to ask for.
| Field | Deadpan Labs |
|---|---|
| Legal entity | Deadpan Labs LLC |
| Founded | 2026 |
| Based in | Miami, Florida, United States |
| How we work | Remote-first, with companies anywhere |
| What we build | SEO and AI-search visibility, paid media and brand, the platform a store runs on, software and mobile, security |
| Who it is for | Small and growing ecommerce brands — Shopify and DTC first, marketplace sellers welcome |
| Signed client work | None yet — we say so rather than implying otherwise |
| What we will not promise | A ranking, or that an AI assistant will recommend you |
The last two rows are the ones most agencies leave off a page like this. They are the reason the rest of it is worth reading.
Questions buyers ask
Frequently asked.
Who is Deadpan Labs?
Deadpan Labs is a small ecommerce growth agency in Miami, Florida, founded in 2026 and working remote-first. We get Shopify and DTC brands found — ranked in search and named in the AI answers buyers now ask first — and we build the platform the business runs on. Being small is the design, not a stage we are trying to grow out of: you talk to the person doing the work rather than an account manager relaying messages. The name is the standard we hold ourselves to — we would rather say a plain thing that is true than a big thing that is not.
How many people work there, and does that matter?
It is a lean firm by choice, and the trade is real in both directions. What you give up is bench depth — we cannot staff four parallel workstreams the way a fifty-person agency can, and we will tell you when a job is bigger than us. What you get is that nothing is translated: the person who scoped the work writes the code and reads the search data, so there is no handoff between a strategy deck and an implementation nobody attended the meeting for.
Can you show client work?
No, and that is the honest answer rather than a coy one. Deadpan Labs has no signed client engagements yet, so there is no case study, no logo wall, and no roster to show you. What exists is first-party: we grew one of our own products from zero to more than 900 organic downloads with no ad spend, we run this company on the same platform we sell, and we run the same monthly AI-visibility panels on our own brands that we would run on yours. That is a smaller receipt than most agencies show. It is the one that is actually ours.
Why does an agency this size build its own platform instead of reselling SaaS?
Because the alternative is selling you the problem. Zylo's 2026 SaaS Management Index reports the average company manages 305 SaaS applications with license utilization at 54%, and BetterCloud's 2026 State of SaaS report found only 56% of the applications organizations use carry IT approval. An agency that assembles more subscriptions is adding to that. Building the dashboard means we feel every awkward part of it before a client does, because we are logging into it every day to run our own company.
Why is the marketing attached to the build here?
Because whether an engine can read your product is decided by how the page was built. Semrush, in a study of 5,000 keywords and more than 150,000 citations, found Perplexity's cited domains overlap Google's organic top ten by more than 91%, so the technical work and the getting-found work are the same surface read by different machines. Meanwhile the Pew Research Center, tracking 900 U.S. adults across 68,879 Google searches in March 2025, found people clicked a traditional result on 8% of visits where an AI summary appeared against 15% where none did. Shipping without a plan for being found is shipping into a channel that is getting quieter.
What will you not do?
We will not promise you a ranking or promise that an assistant will recommend you, because no vendor controls what a search engine ranks or what a model says, and the honest version of this work is a direction over time rather than a guarantee. We will not invent a client to make ourselves look established. And we will not keep carrying work your own team can do — the point of training your team on the platform on day one is that you are able to leave.