Stephen Zhang

I run marketing for cross-border brands, and I build the agents that run the operations.

For founders who make things in China and sell them in North America and Europe. I work as a fractional head of marketing or as an advisor, from Shenzhen, in English and Chinese.

work@zhangshustephen.com

Work

An e-trike brand selling to riders over fifty in North America

2023 to now, marketing consultant to the CEO

I've run its marketing end to end since launch: the brand, the storefront, paid media, creators, dealers, launch events, and the US team that carries them out.

Most of the analysis is built and run with agents: conversion read from real session data, a repurchase model, owner surveys, social listening counted by distinct person, affiliate orders audited against eight known fraud patterns, and a Bayesian model of ad performance across 231 campaigns.

An e-bike brand, rebuilt after a public crisis

2022 to 2023, head of brand and direct-to-consumer, team of fifteen

I joined after a crisis had cut sales and conversion. Rebuilding trust meant earned coverage in the major tech press, more than a hundred creator partnerships on YouTube and Instagram, a rebuilt owner community, and a storefront reworked with heatmaps, A/B tests and native-speaker copy in every language we sold in. The crisis coverage dropped off the first page of search.

Before that

2023
Head of brand and direct-to-consumer at an Amazon-born baby-products company. A research-led repositioning, and a storefront built from zero.
2021 to 2022
Head of marketing and product manager at a maker of LED and laser vehicle lighting. New positioning, Scrum, more than ten product launches, and trade shows abroad run remotely through COVID.
2020 to 2021
Senior market researcher at a Shenzhen hardware maker. Built the research function from zero and supported three product launches.

Built

Until March 2025 I had never shipped software. Everything here was built since then, working with coding agents, and I use all of it every day.

Mailroom

One inbox for every mailbox, private

Signs in to all nine of my mailboxes across Gmail, IMAP and Outlook, keeps a year of mail on hand, and gives my agents one place to read, search, file and send. It runs on a Raspberry Pi at home, with a web app and a desktop app on top.

Workstate

Tasks and handoffs for every project, private

Each project I run keeps its tasks, its current focus and its session handoffs here. Every Claude Code and Codex session reads and writes the same record through one API, so the next session picks up where the last one stopped. It runs on a server in Hong Kong and replicates to my two machines.

Vtypes

Voice typing for Windows, vtypes.com

Reads what's on screen before it cleans up the transcript, so a dictated "symlinks" doesn't come out as "sink links". A fork of the open-source Voquill with Windows UI Automation added.

Writing

Agentic Marketing

A practitioner's guide to AI-powered marketing operations, in progress

A book for marketers who want agents doing real work. Each chapter is built around a workflow I run, with configurations that are real and tested. Chapters are published here as they're drafted.

Part I. Foundations

  1. What agentic marketing actually is
  2. The agent toolkit

Part II. Workflows

  1. Content operations
  2. Market research and competitive intelligence
  3. Email and CRM automation
  4. Social media and community
  5. Advertising and campaign management
  6. SEO and growth

Part III. Building and scaling

  1. Building your first marketing agent
  2. Multi-agent systems
  3. Measurement and iteration
  4. The human-agent operating model

About

I'm Stephen Zhang (张舒, Zhang Shu). I studied law in a Chinese-American joint program with Fort Hays State University and passed the Chinese bar, then studied engineering physics at the University of Oldenburg in Germany.

In 2013 I left to co-found a trading and engineering company in Cameroon: construction materials, equipment rental, phone-brand promotion and freight. It was profitable in its first year and grew to fifty people.

Since 2020 I've worked on marketing for Shenzhen brands that sell abroad: e-bikes, vehicle lighting, baby products, e-trikes. Since 2025 I've built agents to run the operating side of that work.

I also write two things that have nothing to do with marketing: Uniflection, a reference work that teaches economics from the arguments economists actually have, and 1628 South Africa, a novel.

Contact

work@zhangshustephen.com

Write with what you sell, where you sell it, and what's stuck.

Seal reading 张舒之印, the seal of Zhang Shu