Phil Crumm.
Managing Partner at Fueled — and the person behind fulcrumm.
I've always been a generalist. I started as a developer — PHP and MySQL on forum software and newspaper CMS migrations — and spent years close to the code before realizing the problems I found most interesting weren't the technical ones. They were systems problems. Why does this process take so long? Why does this team keep running into the same friction? What would have to be true for this to work differently?
That instinct carried me through nearly a decade at 10up — now part of Fueled — where I went from Senior Web Strategist to SVP of Technology to Managing Partner of a 220-person content practice. Fortune 500s, major healthcare systems, global hospitality brands, the media companies you've heard of — the client list is broad. The work underneath it is narrower: help publishers and brands stop running content like a cost center and start running it like the asset it actually is.
Day to day, that's setting strategic direction for how we build AI-powered content operations, working clients through CMS architecture decisions they shouldn't have to make alone, and supporting a leadership team across technology, design, open source, AI, and content strategy. I stay close to the market — speaking at WordCamp US, CloudFest USA, and WebflowConf, working complex deals, and keeping in touch with the clients who matter most.
Why fulcrumm
fulcrumm is where I apply the same approach to problems I run into in my own life — and the lives of the people around me. Not products built around market opportunities or clever technology. Products built around friction that's real, specific, and annoying enough to be worth solving.
The name means something. A fulcrum is the pivot point that makes leverage possible — a small, well-placed input that moves something much larger. That's the ambition: find the right place to push, push there, watch something disproportionate happen. Problems first. Always.
How I think about building
I look for frictions I, and the people around me, run into in real life. Not hypothetical user personas — actual people, actual annoyances, actual time lost to processes that shouldn't exist. Then I try to find the simplest solution that removes the friction entirely, rather than reducing it.
I'm a systems thinker at heart. I like understanding why something works the way it does before trying to change it. I'm suspicious of solutions that add complexity. And I believe the best products are the ones you stop noticing — because they've made a problem disappear.