Rob Brautigam

I'm a 90s kid, born in Connecticut and raised in Newtown. Montessori school taught me to think outside the box, and I played baseball and ice hockey all the way through high school.

When I was 13, my baseball team went undefeated. They played "We Are The Champions" after the final game, and winning became the standard.

When I wasn't at practice, I was building computers out of scrap parts at my dad's office, then using them to sell Pokémon cards, Boy Scout patches and video game accessories. I made my first $1,000 online by 13.

My office was in southwest Connecticut, but most of the work was on job sites: Manhattan and the other boroughs, and across the Northeast, from Connecticut and New York to Vermont, New Hampshire and Massachusetts. When I was in the office, I sat in a cubicle, staring at a screen, thinking: is this really it? Is this what the next 40 years looks like?

Following their lead had taken me to a dead end. Then I realized that if I wasn't going to change my life, no one else was. I started living my life by design, not by default.

Living by design meant an endless path of self-education: books, podcasts, events, and surrounding myself with like-minded people. On my commute I read Rich Dad Poor Dad, Tony Robbins, Gary Vee and The Miracle Morning. Every one of them said the same thing: the system you're inside was designed to keep you inside.

In 2015 I got into real estate investing and bought my first investment property.

The same year came my first business: Amazon FBA, buying products in bulk from China and selling them on Amazon, then ecommerce. From 2014 into 2015 I was also building sales funnels, webinars, digital products, email marketing sequences, lead generation and sales campaigns, and Facebook advertising for clients.

Brauto Labs began that year too, as my own consulting, partnerships and one-off projects. I've been building and selling businesses ever since.

I was about to sit for the professional engineering exam. Instead I bet on building online businesses, and in April 2016 I left engineering for good. I flew to Vietnam on a one-⁠way ticket.

Barely enough savings for a few months. No backup plan. Everyone thought I was crazy, but the real risk wasn't leaving. The real risk was staying.

Over 2016 and 2017 I lived in and traveled through several countries across Southeast Asia.

I'd been building funnels, webinars and ad campaigns for clients, and I figured if I could help other people do it, why not do it for myself? In October 2016 I started my own high-ticket affiliate marketing business.

There were moments the math didn't work and the only rational move was to fly home. I'd burned that bridge on purpose.

On Christmas Day 2016 I closed my first two five-figure deals while walking on Waikiki Beach. That's when I knew I was on to something big, and I doubled down.

My first $10,000 month came in January 2017, the fourth month of the business.

Working for myself, I was making double what I made a month as an engineer, and then more than I could ever have imagined making as one.

My first million-dollar year came in 2019, three years after I left engineering to work for myself.

I built a seven-figure business in under nine months, and I've coached more than 2,000 entrepreneurs.

To go from six to seven figures, I invested $100,000 in a single advisor.

I developed a high-ticket sales system responsible for more than $100M in international sales of physical products in health and longevity.

From 2016 to 2019 I lived as a global nomad, with Vietnam as a recurring base. I've lived in more than ten countries, and once in 37 different locations in a single year.

In 2020 I built Conversions for entrepreneurs: digital creators, consultants and agencies. It was one-on-one coaching, group coaching, a community and a full education program.

The curriculum took a business from the inside out. It started with a chief aim and the mindset behind it, then a niche and an ideal client, a signature offer and its pricing, and a client acquisition funnel. Then the content that attracts clients on Instagram and Facebook, booking strategy sessions through messages, and the sales calls that close them. It finished with onboarding, a backend offer, and building and monetizing a free Facebook group.

In 2021 I took a six-⁠month sabbatical.

Then I co-founded Crypto Collective, a Discord community of more than 3,000 Web3 investors and builders.

I spent the next year deep in Web3, often working up to 20 hours a day. The requests for help followed, and I started advising Web3 projects.

In 2024 I became a partner in Write That Right.

Brand Alchemy started attracting household names and extremely well-known thought leaders. Many of them are under NDA, but we've built brands for the people you see when you open Instagram, YouTube and LinkedIn.

Among them: someone with more than a billion followers, and someone with a billion-dollar net worth. Our clients also include nine-figure founders, New York Times best-selling authors and TEDx speakers.

Where I'm going is with things like Brauto Labs: the Company OS for more founder-led companies, sold in the order it gets built. Map. Build. Run. The Blueprint maps the company in one to two weeks, the Build makes the asset in 30 to 90 days, and the Operating Seat runs it, month to month. More than 40 production services already run businesses today, built and operated by Brauto Labs.

And I build in public, publishing open-source repositories on my GitHub, from an orchestrator that runs many AI coding agents on one codebase to a bridge that lets any AI agent drive a real browser.