How Karee Laing Built a Career Beyond the Script

Growing up in Jamaica, Karee Laing was raised with a clear definition of success: become a lawyer. She followed that path diligently, earning her JD/MBA and developing a deep appreciation for the analytical rigor of legal thinking and complex problem-solving.

Then, one MBA elective changed everything.

The course sparked an unexpected fascination with business strategy and revealed something Karee hadn't fully recognized before: her greatest strengths lived at the intersection of logic, creativity, analysis, and storytelling. Suddenly, the future she'd always imagined for herself no longer felt like the only possibility.

Trusting that instinct, Karee stepped away from the traditional path and into the world of marketing and branding. After working in-house and building a branding agency, she eventually launched Studio SB, a strategic branding firm designed for founders seeking more than beautiful visuals. But as she helped clients build stronger brands, she noticed a recurring challenge: many founders still struggled to translate brand clarity into growth. That insight led her to create MOXIEMO, an AI-powered platform that functions like a Chief Marketing Officer, helping businesses streamline and automate their marketing efforts while making strategic expertise more accessible.

In this Q&A, Karee shares her journey, the lessons she's learned, and why the most rewarding careers often emerge when we're willing to redefine success on our own terms.

Can you delve deeper into the evolution of your company's mission and values over time?

When I started, my mission was very narrow: help businesses build better brands. Over time, I realized that mission was incomplete—and, honestly, a little too comfortable. A brand tells people who you are. It doesn't tell them who you're for, where to find them, what they need to hear, or how to turn attention into revenue. 

The real problem, I realized, wasn't branding. There’s so much of that already! Most businesses don’t streamline their actual go-to-market strategy, which is the foundation that connects positioning to distribution to content to revenue. That realization shifted everything. My mission evolved from "helping founders look right" to "helping founders build the entire system that gets them seen by the right people, saying the right things, consistently." 

MOXIEMO is that evolution made real. It’s an AI-powered platform that builds your marketing foundation first, turns it into strategy, then generates content in your actual voice. This changes the scale at which I can finally deliver on my work.

What’s been the most unexpected part of your entrepreneurial journey?

Becoming a SaaS founder. I spent over a decade as a brand strategist, a service provider, an advisor, and someone who worked behind the scenes making other founders look brilliant. I never imagined I would be the one building a product, writing a PRD, testing a private beta, or learning what "Founding Members" even means in a tech context. 

The more businesses I worked with, though, the more obvious it became that the gap I kept solving manually—and one client at a time—was a gap thousands of founders were experiencing. The only way to close it at scale was to build the thing myself. 

MOXIEMO started as a side project and became the thing I now spend a lot of my time on. Currently, I’m in private beta, working toward our next release, and I'm documenting the entire process publicly. This includes the parts that are hard, uncertain, or still being figured out. It's the most unexpected turn in my career—and also the one that, in hindsight, makes the most sense.

We dare you to brag: What achievements are you most proud of?

Right now, what I’m most proud of isn't a credential, but the decision to build MOXIEMO at all—and to do it in the open. For most of my career, I believed my work should speak for itself. I was the strategist behind the strategist, comfortable advising founders on bold moves while staying carefully out of the spotlight myself. Pivoting from "agency owner giving advice" to "founder building a product" required a different kind of courage. It meant taking everything I knew about brand and go-to-market strategy and betting that I could turn it into something scalable without knowing for certain it would work. 

The fear was real. Honestly, it still is. There's a specific kind of vulnerability in building something, putting your name on it, and not knowing if it will live up to what founders need or what I believe it can be. I've had to sit with that doubt and keep building, anyway. Deciding to document this publicly instead of waiting until everything is polished and perfect is deeply outside my comfort zone, so I am truly proud of that.

What’s the biggest misconception others have around entrepreneurship?

Right now, the misconception I'm most focused on correcting is the idea that AI can replace good marketing or foundational items like strategy. Founders are being sold the promise that AI will fix their marketing by writing their posts, building their content calendars, and generating their captions. For a while, it can feel like it's working. But AI without a strategic foundation doesn't solve the problem. It just produces more content—faster—that still doesn't convert. 

The real misconception is thinking that having a brand is the same as having a go-to-market strategy. A brand tells people who you are. A go-to-market strategy tells you who you're for, where to find them, and how to turn attention into revenue. AI can be an incredible accelerator, but only after that strategic foundation exists.

What have you learned about building a team and a support network around yourself?

You cannot build a product alone, and trying to is its own kind of ego. For most of my career, I operated as the expert, the one people came to for answers. Becoming a founder building a tech platform meant becoming the least experienced person in the room on certain things. Sometimes, I had to actually say that out loud. I joined a cohort of women founders building in tech specifically because I needed people who understood what this build required—not just emotionally, but also technically and strategically. That cohort has become one of the most important support systems I have. Beyond that, female founder communities have shown up in ways I didn't expect by opening doors, offering perspective, and sometimes just reminding me that I'm not building this in isolation.

What’s next for you and your company?

We're heads-down building toward our next beta release for MOXIEMO, expanding what the platform can do for founders who are building their go-to-market strategy for the first time. I'm excited about where this goes beyond founders, too. The same foundation-first approach that works for a $1M founder also applies to nonprofits and mission-driven organizations that have impact stories worth telling but no strategic infrastructure behind their messaging. 

Longer term, I want MOXIEMO to be the thing that makes real marketing strategy accessible to builders who've never had access to it, not just those who can afford a full team. Personally, I'm continuing to document this entire build publicly because I think founders need to see what it actually looks like to build the thing you've been telling everyone else to build.