After directly helping over 150 clients across 10+ industries and 20 countries, Laurens Tijssen noticed something that would change how he thought about business forever. Most businesses invest heavily in marketing, sales, and fulfillment, but they skip the step that makes everything else work. They optimize their funnel before they have fixed their positioning. They scale outreach before they have built authority. They launch campaigns before the world knows who they are.
That observation became the foundation of what Laurens now calls Step Zero. Everything that happens before people interact with you. Before you optimize your funnel. Before you scale your outreach. Before you work on a new marketing campaign. You fix your positioning so that every interaction, every impression, every touchpoint works in your favor.
“Who is [your name]?” is what business looks like in 2026-2027.
That is the question prospects are asking AI engines before they ever visit your website. Before they schedule a call. Before they read your pricing. Everything that shapes how the world sees you happens before they ever speak to you. And most entrepreneurs are treating it as an afterthought.
The Positioning Problem Nobody Talks About
Here is the thing most people do not want to hear. Regardless of your offers, your sales numbers, and your marketing efforts, the stronger your positioning is as a brand, the more easily everything else in business becomes. This is not a soft insight. It is a structural reality.
Roughly 48% to 50% of new businesses close within five years, and about 65% close within ten years. Laurens has seen this pattern up close through experience in 10+ industries including B2B service Companies, Info Products, Logistics, Real Estate, Web3, among others. What the “Topman in High-Level Online Positioning” as published in Mashable points out is that one major reason brands struggle is that they skip the foundation and wonder why their funnels leak. They pour money into traffic while their positioning tells the world they are interchangeable. They scale outreach while their narrative says nothing. They run campaigns while their credibility layer is empty.
Laurens Tijssen founded Breathpage in 2021 with a simple mission: help businesses build the kind of brand presence that makes everything else easier. He dropped out of college during his exams in January 2022 with a goal to make at least €2,000 per month by the end of that year. He hit that goal in one month. By early 2025, he had grown Breathpage to a team of 9 people and positioned it as the #1 leading website agency in Europe, backed by media coverage in over 12 publications. The lesson from that journey shaped everything he now teaches clients.
Step Zero is the answer to this problem. It is everything that happens before people interact with you.
The Four-Part System That Changes Everything
Step Zero is not a single tactic. It is a hybrid system designed to continually improve your brand across four interconnected areas.
The first pillar is Strategic Positioning. This is the foundation. Who you are. Who you serve. What you stand for. Laurens defines and refines positioning for clients so every placement, every piece of content, and every AI mention reinforces the same authority narrative. Without this, everything else is built on sand.
The second pillar is Media Authority. Guaranteed placements on publications your prospects and AI models actually read. Not random blogs. Strategic features that position you as the answer in your space. Laurens has published over 500 articles for clients across Forbes, USA Today, Rolling Stone, Business Insider, and Reuters. That track record is a result of understanding which publications actually move the needle and how to get clients placed there consistently.
The third pillar is AI Visibility, also known as Answer Engine Optimization. It’s the new art of marketing to track what ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini say about you across the prompts your prospects actually ask. It is the new frontier of brand presence, and Laurens has been ahead of this curve since launching the Google Power Play guide, a framework focused on dominating brand authority and being part of the most outstanding 0.1% of Google searches, those same tractics now directly influence AEO too.
The fourth pillar is the Content Engine. If you listen to any podcast with Laurens, he talks about the concept of being resourceful, an example of what he has shown is a system that turns your expertise into consistent output without eating your time. This is the final part of the “Step Zero” offer that additionally comes with Interview Q&As. Call-to-content pipelines and Newsjacking feeds that keep you relevant in real time.
The Real ROI of Positioning Before Performance
There are two sides to brand building that most people only know one of. The first is controlled and guaranteed. Relationships. Access. Predictable results. That is what strategic PR delivers every time. Laurens has been doing this for years, getting clients into Entrepreneur, USA Today, Business Insider. IB Times and a ton of placements more.
The second side is pitching. Podcasts. Speaking events. Media opportunities. This side is never guaranteed, but when it works, it compounds. Most agencies only do one or the other. Laurens has built a system that does both. Guaranteed PR every month plus automated systems for pitching and placement. Control with scale. Predictability with opportunity. That is the future of PR.
Work month-to-month with Laurens and Breathpage as your right-hand team for Strategic Positioning, Media Authority, and AI Visibility. Zero in on your brand before you scale anything else. Because if you are expecting thousands of visitors from a single feature, you will be disappointed. But if you are using it to influence how the world sees you, you are playing the right game.
That is where the real ROI lives.
