An Uncommon Combination
of Marketer & Engineer

For contracting inquiries, visit CustomDatasets.com

13+ years of engineering from firmware to large-scale web scraping & indexing
13+ years in SEO & performance marketing

Ben Wills

What I'm Building Now

Owner & Engineer

CustomDatasets.com • 2025–Present

  • Custom dataset contracting: web scraping, parsing, and data infrastructure for marketing teams
  • Commercial WebGraph dataset products derived from Common Crawl (historical domain/host metrics)
  • API layer for structured, queryable retrieval of web graph intelligence

Owner & Engineer

MarketingEngineer.io • 2025–Present

  • Educational platform bridging marketing and engineering for technically ambitious marketers
  • Teaching systems architecture behind marketing platforms: search engines, ML, databases, distributed systems
  • Daily video content focused on first principles and engineering fundamentals for marketing context

Owner & Engineer

OppAlerts.com • 2025–Present

  • Building a more sophisticated alternative to Google Alerts
  • Focused on identifying and alerting users to marketing opportunities
  • Keyword monitoring and customizable alert systems

Embedded Systems, Web Scraping, & Search Engines

Contractor & Consultant

Misc • 2016–Present

  • Built local sponsorship finder + database
  • Data collection systems for sponsorship opportunities
  • Director of SEO in Austin; extensive local SEO + PPC work

Contractor

High-End Audio Company • 2022–2023

  • Pure C firmware for ESP32 from scratch
  • Custom networking protocol between ESP32 and PIC32
  • Cross-platform networking library + firmware update systems

Owner & Developer

ontolo • 2008–2024

  • Marketing tool focused on SEO and link opportunities
  • Rewritten from scratch in 2015 in pure C to download/parse up to 400M URLs/day
  • Started as an agency, evolved into a successful SaaS

SEO Agency Team Management, SMB Strategy & Execution

Contractor

Various • 2006–Present

  • SEO and pay-per-click campaigns for small and medium businesses
  • Large-scale web scraping and custom databases for marketing intelligence and competitive analysis
  • Custom datasets and reports built specifically for marketing objectives and strategic decisions

VP of Operations

Fortune Interactive • 2005–2006

  • Managed writers, SEO analysts, editors, and account managers
  • Grew to $140,000+ monthly revenue in 9 months
  • Oversaw rapid company growth and team expansion

Director of Search Marketing

WebSourced/KeywordRanking • 2001–2005

  • Managed 70–80 person team of analysts, writers, and managers
  • Led Motorola international SEO campaign (30–40 countries)
  • Managed Lowe's SEO campaign; oversaw 1400+ client accounts
  • Conducted weekly company-wide SEO training