About Gnarlywhal · We help good businesses be seen clearly.

What we believe

Every business is somebody's baby.

It was started with risk and belief, long before there was proof it would work. Over the years it became people's livelihoods, a customer's trust, something real in a community.

Most websites show none of that. They flatten years of work into safe, generic claims, hide the founder, and make a business look interchangeable when it is anything but. That gap, between what a company has become and what its website says, is where trust quietly gets lost.

The most impressive thing about a business is usually the thing it forgot to mention. So the job is not to make any company look good. It is to help good ones be seen for what they already are.

Done right, a website stops being a brochure. It becomes evidence.

The people

None of this is theory. Here are the two people behind it.

Alex Moura

Co-founder, Gnarlywhal · CEO, Digital Star Marketing

He cannot stand watching a good business lose to a worse one with a better website.

Alex learned marketing where it is hardest to fake: music, building real independence for working artists long before he touched a SaaS dashboard. He would rather make something true than make something loud, and he has run Digital Star Marketing for over a decade. He has a degree in Economics from UNC Wilmington, which he almost never brings up.

Katherine Moura

Co-founder, Gnarlywhal · CBCO, K2 Insurance Services · CMO, K2 Cyber

If it is not good enough to be proud of, it does not ship.

Katherine has spent her career making good companies sound like themselves, from venture-backed startups to the forty-plus brands she leads now. She studied journalism before she ever wrote a tagline, which is why she trusts the truth over the clever line. At Gnarlywhal, she is the final word, and the highest bar in the room.

How we got here

Thirty years of doing this for other people.

It didn't come from nowhere. Here is the short version.

2008 · Where it started

It started with the music.

At twenty-two, Alex built a nonprofit apparel project to help rebuild homes in New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward. Give people something real and they show up. That never stopped being true.

$8,815 raised for the Lower Ninth Ward

2013–2018 · TRI Studios

We made artists independent.

Out of Bob Weir's studio, we built direct-to-fan businesses for working musicians. Todd Snider sold over a million dollars in merch and owns an audience of 118,000 fans, with no label in the middle.

$1M+ direct-to-fan · 118K owned fans

The startup years

We took companies to the finish line.

Katherine grew iContact's revenue from seven million to twenty-six in a single year, and led CoverHound through its acquisition by Brown & Brown. Knowing how a company gets bought changes how you build its brand.

$7M → $26.2M in one year

2014 → today · Digital Star

We built the agency.

Twenty-six clients across insurtech, music, sports, and spirits. A $12M Series A for Rainbow. For Functional Finance, marketing from zero to thirty-one leads a month at a 677% return on ad spend.

677% ROAS · 1 → 31 leads a month

2026 · Now

So we built Gnarlywhal.

All of it, turned into one system that does it for anyone. We pointed it at Proctor Electric first: built, shipped, and ranking number one on Google in a market full of competitors.

Proctor · live, and #1 on Google

Where we're going

We see people before they see themselves.

The goal doesn't change: every good business seen as deeply as it has earned. Not louder. Not faker. Seen accurately. We find what you have already built, make it legible to the people and the machines they ask, and hand it back to you to own. Better reputation, more of the right people, more real work. That loop is the whole company.

We build the website before you ever hire us. And 10% of every full build goes to a cause you choose.

That is not a marketing tactic. It is how we want to work: from abundance, for people we believe in. We operate like the businesses we admire.

See your free website