How Adam Scaled CanopyGuard to Its First 100 Downloaded Reports

Meet Adam McClarin.

Adam is based in Friendswood, Texas, just outside Houston.

He is a CISSP certified security professional, a solo full-stack engineer, and the founder of Meraki is Love. Everything he builds runs through that lens, the technical and the intentional together.

Adam’s startup story will be focusing on CanopyGuard, a free website audit tool.

I built CanopyGuard the way I build most things. Alone, at odd hours, with a problem I could not stop turning over in my head.

That problem was simple to state and hard to solve. Website owners had no fast way to see what was actually broken behind the scenes. Not just SEO. Security gaps, missing headers, blind spots that only show up once someone with a security background goes looking.

I started building in February 2026. CanopyGuard went live at the end of May 2026.

It’s a free tool that scans 47 signals across SEO (Search Engine Optimization), AEO (Answer Engine Optimization), GEO (Generative Engine Optimization), and security in about 15 seconds. No account required. No gatekeeping.

The first version of CanopyGuard was too simple. A potential client told me straight, this only scratches the surface, I need something with more depth.

That single piece of feedback changed the entire direction of the product. I rebuilt the scoring around the CISSP framework I already lived in every day. Security depth became the differentiator, not an afterthought bolted onto an SEO tool.

The decision to change the product is what got CanopyGuard to its first 100 users. By the beginning of July 2026, 100 people had run the scan and downloaded their report.

I gauge traction by that one number, reports downloaded, because it is the moment someone decided the results were worth keeping.

Getting to where I am now was not one channel.

It was Reddit comments in threads where the question was already being asked, never a cold post. LinkedIn, where the audience is builders and agencies who actually read a security score. Facebook groups, Instagram, Medium, Substack, all carrying the same story in a voice suited to each room.

PeerPush listed the tool too, and that surfaced a real lesson. The visibility index climbed to 94 with almost no clicks to show for it. The traffic was trapped inside the platform listing itself. Once I routed that listing to a specific blog post instead of the homepage, the clicks started moving.

The free scan does most of the convincing on its own. Someone runs their site, reads the report, and the conversation starts there.

CanopyGuard was never meant to stand alone.

It is the front door to Meraki BIP, the managed AI lead generation platform I built after CanopyGuard.

The audit shows someone what is broken. Meraki BIP is what I build once we know what to fix, the conversational engine, the prospecting, the distribution, all of it working while the business owner is doing anything but marketing.

CanopyGuard runs on React and Vite, hosted on Vercel.

The scan engine comes from my CISSP background. It is the same manual audit routine I used to run for clients, now automated.

This month the security layer started mapping straight to the MITRE ATT&CK framework, so a flagged issue comes back tagged to the actual technique behind it instead of a generic warning.

I wrote up the technical breakdown here if you want to know more.

My advice to anyone starting out: build the thing you already know how to do for a living, then make it free and fast enough that a stranger trusts it in one sitting.

CanopyGuard exists because I stopped gatekeeping a process I was already running by hand for paying clients.

CanopyGuard is still free. It still runs in 15 seconds. And it is still the first thing I point people to before we talk about anything deeper I might build for them.

If you want to see what your own site is actually carrying under the surface, run it.

Reach out to Adam on these platforms:

See you next time.

Thanks,
Jakob Jelling

I’m on X. Come out and play.