I’ve never met Elwood Wiles, but his name is all over my neighborhood. His work is undeniably good, because I can still see it after more than a century. In fact, I can walk on it.

As Portland expanded in the early 1900s, settlers built the area I now stroll through when I need a break. On many street corners, I look down and see a familiar stamp in the pavement:

Perhaps Elwood Wiles was the only sidewalk artist in town. Or maybe he’d mastered a concrete craft few others had. I see other names and later years once I walk beyond my neighborhood, but Elwood seems to have imprinted himself on the square mile around my house.

Let’s get one thing straight: he didn’t always spell the street names correctly. At every corner, he pressed letters into wet cement, one at a time, to identify each road. There’s a GLENN AVE that is very clearly GLEEN. Around the bend, there’s an unexplained 31TH.

What he lacked in spelling he made up for in structural integrity. Some tiles crack at the edges, and a few have completely crumbled, but most of Elwood’s work is intact after 115+ years.

His name is still there too, nearly 12 decades after he pressed it into that mix of sand and stone.

The good news for you: your impressions don’t need to last nearly that long.

But there’s a lot of noise, so you need to cut through it with a giant concrete saw of clarity. Know the ​contexts where you want to be discoverable​. Make sure you show up when developers look for those solutions.

That means knowing how and when LLMs recommend you. No surprise here: I can help you stress-test your positioning against Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and others.

Want an objective view of how your product is seen? This is the last week to get a custom report. Reports start at $499 and include a call with me. Reply to let me know you’re interested.