Jules Canlas

Jules Canlas, also known as Julian Canlas, is the founder and CEO of Embarque (embarque.io), a productised SEO agency that started in 2020. Embarque sells monthly SEO and content packages to startups and SaaS companies, and its own site lists VEED, Riverside and EmailOctopus among the companies it has helped grow through search. It now pitches itself as an SEO and GEO agency that pairs senior strategists with agentic AI systems to win traffic from Google and AI search engines.

Canlas studied English Literature with Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia and has been paid to write since he was 16. In 2018, while living in London and working full-time at a French email tech company, he found the indie maker community, became an editor at Maker Mag and was soon earning far more from freelance work than from his salary.

The idea for Embarque came from a May 2020 conversation with Dominic Monn, founder of MentorCruise, who wanted to scale SEO content without hunting for writers. Canlas chose a productised service instead of a marketplace, built the site in an afternoon and launched about four weeks later while still employed. The first client took roughly two and a half months to arrive, but the agency reached $4,000 MRR by September 2020 and six-figure annual revenue by December 2020. In a 2021 Failory interview he put MRR at about $12,000, and by late 2023 the Ramen Club podcast described Embarque at more than $700,000 in annual recurring revenue.

Embarque is remote-first, with writers, editors and strategists spread across the UK, US, Asia, Africa and Europe. Canlas also lists Keyword Metrics, a rank tracking tool, as a second company, and posts on Bluesky about SaaS growth, SEO and sobriety.