about ky.
ky brutnell builds systems that operate on attention. this is a record of how he got there. the books he read in each period are listed with it.
the sunshine coast.
ky was born in 2001 and grew up on the sunshine coast. his mother is a leader in australian primary education. his father coached strength and fitness for australia’s olympic swimmers. he lives in brisbane now, engaged, marrying next year.
he played chess as a child. weekend tournaments first, then national ones.
the scholarship.
a test result moved him from his public school to sunshine coast grammar on an academic scholarship. he held it through primary and secondary school and graduated in december 2018.
he read constantly. adventure novels first, then philosophy, strategy and systems. a short period of acting led to videography.
accounting.
he studied accounting at the university of queensland, with electives in quantitative finance and game theory. he chose it as the language of business.
his first job was as an accountant at evolveaa. the firm’s director, cameron, taught him client work. he wrote python scripts to produce the sets of financials he had been doing by hand at night.
while he was still at university, a headhunter called from pitcher partners. he decided that if he did not leave accounting then, he never would. he left for marketing and the data engineering behind it.
aginic.
he had come to think that attention markets move before financial markets. in may 2022 he joined aginic, a brisbane data consultancy, to work in its marketing team.
mantel group acquired aginic in august 2022. by then the content cadence had gone from one piece every two months to one a week. the acquisition moved him into the group’s head office marketing team.
mantel group.
at mantel group he built the lead management system end to end. fifteen copy decks, a landing page and a google ads campaign for each, every lead routed into salesforce with a notification to sales, and the results tracked in ga4 and looker dashboards he built.
he ran campaign strategy while the company appointed a new cmo, onboarded them, documented every live system, and left.
navitas.
at navitas he sent fifty thousand emails a month. student journeys in salesforce marketing cloud, emails coded in html and css, value propositions for twenty-five university disciplines.
he advertised scholarships, then retargeted every applicant who missed out. the funnel sent organic traffic to the university psychology pages, and the first article under his seo plan became the most-read piece on the site.
esri.
he spent six months at esri australia, working on the partner ecosystem for geospatial software, where deals are made through relationships rather than feeds.
in the evenings, with his employer’s blessing, he built navigateengine. in january 2025 he left to work on it full time.
navigateengine.
founded in 2024, launched in 2025. 248 checks decide whether a website earns, and it runs every one of them, nightly.
first it finds every entity.
thirty-one canonical types across ga4, google ads and meta. the account, the campaign, the ad group, the keyword, the landing page, the conversion, the audience, the pixel. hydrateengine fills each blank schema from the platform’s own api.
then it forces one shape.
every entity serialises to the same four sections: keys, checklist, performance, configuration. a search campaign and a landing page become the same kind of object, so the same question can be asked of both.
five config checks. three performance checks.
per entity type, every night. checkengine reads the logic and writes true, false or unknown. a check is binary and measured from the platform’s own data, so nobody gets to have an opinion about it.
config gates performance.
one failed config check freezes the three performance checks beneath it. the frozen rows are current state. the released rows are goal state. most australian companies cannot name the difference on their own entities, and that is where marketing payroll and adspend go to waste.
then it closes the gap.
diagnose the red, write the fix, apply it, re-run the check. launchengine writes back through the same api hydrateengine read, and every red that clears releases the three checks it held down. that loop is the service.
navigateengine.
a permanent diagnostic and remediation layer where an agency used to sit.
navigateengine.com