TEAM · NICK ROWE
Nick Rowe. Co-founder & CEO, Saigon Digital.
Working at the intersection of business, design, development and growth
I run Saigon Digital, a full-service agency in Ho Chi Minh City working with international brands on design, development, SEO, data and AI-driven search. Before that: teacher, freelancer, consultant, software engineer, technical director, CTO. The through line is building the thing rather than describing it.
What I care about is not building fast, it is building properly. With clarity. With accountability. With people who care about the work. I am not interested in hype without substance, or strategy without execution.
In practice that means three things: websites that scale, marketing that drives revenue rather than vanity metrics, and systems that take friction out of the way for teams and customers.
Contact me via:
What I am usually in the room for
The parts of the work I am personally hands-on with.
- Where growth actually comes from
- Diagnosis before proposal. Most briefs describe a symptom. The useful conversation is the one that finds the constraint: the channel that is underbuilt, the page that is fighting itself, the operation that cannot support the traffic you are asking for.
- Search, including the machines
- Buyers ask ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity before they ask Google, and long before they ask you. I have spent the last two years on how brands get named in those answers, including AI-driven programmatic SEO at scale, and it is now half of what we sell.
- Build decisions that age well
- Headless or not, custom or platform, rebuild or repair. The expensive mistakes in this industry are architectural and they are made in week one. I would rather talk you out of a project than sell you the wrong one.
- The team, and who does your work
- Hiring AI-first people who treat AI as the most powerful colleague they have ever had. Every engagement gets a named project lead and tech lead, and nothing ships without a second expert pair of eyes.
I moved to Vietnam in 2018 with curiosity, a laptop, and no fixed plan.
Several businesses have followed. Some worked, some did not, and all of them taught me something I could not have read in a book. Saigon Digital is the one that stuck, and it exists because of a gap I kept running into from the client side of the table.
We built the agency we always wanted to hire: expert people, straight answers, and accountability to outcomes rather than activity. No account-manager wall, no junior stack quietly doing the work someone senior sold. If you buy a strategist, you get the strategist.
The route here. Not a straight line, and that turned out to be the point.
Teach, then build
Teacher, freelancer, consultant, software engineer. Learning to explain complicated things simply turns out to be most of the job in this industry, and knowing how software is actually made is the rest.
Run the engineering
Technical director, then CTO. Responsibility for delivery rather than opinions about it: architecture, teams, timelines, and the difference between a plan and a shipped thing.
Own the outcome
Founder, operator, CEO. Strategy and partnerships, the driving force behind new business, and still close enough to the work to spot when it is going wrong.
Work I have led
On site with McLaren
We rebuilt McLaren Construction Group to be found: a platform that finally matched the position, on Prismic and Next.js. Being in the room in the UK rather than on a call is a large part of why it worked.
Elsewhere: Ski.com rebuilt with zero rankings lost and the Expedia booking engine inside it, Seatcraft taken to all-time high revenue within three months of a new store, VALO now cited by ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, and RED up 3,276% in organic impressions.
Writing and thinking out loud
I write about AI search and what it is doing to the discipline, programmatic SEO built with AI in the loop, and the unglamorous engineering underneath it all: DNS, Node, WordPress security, the things that break at 2am. Recent work includes a Grokipedia-driven experiment in programmatic SEO at scale.
If you want the agency's version, that lives on the Saigon Digital blog. The personal site is where the half-formed opinions go first.
974km, and two houses
Anh Chi Em is a social enterprise working with mountain communities in Tra Bong, Quang Ngai. We built their first website, and then the Bricks for New Houses campaign platform behind their housing project: 1,555 homes as the long-term goal, the first 21 being rebuilt in 2026, funded one 50,000 VND brick at a time.
In February 2026 I rode there. Five of us cycled 974km from Saigon to Tra Bong over five days to raise money and awareness for the project, and a second crossing ran from Hanoi back to Saigon later that month. Between the two rides we raised enough to fund two houses.
Building the platform was the day job. The bike was not, and it is the part I would rather be asked about. If you want to put a roof on a house in Tra Bong, a brick is 50,000 VND and the wall has your name on it.
Off the clock
Naturally curious, slightly restless.
Records and sound systems, which turned into DJing in more countries than I planned. Glastonbury whenever the ballot is kind. Football, padel and squash, in descending order of competence. Cities explored through their food, usually on no notice. In 2019 I walked to Everest Base Camp, which remains the best argument I know for doing hard things slowly.
Get in touch
Honest conversations and ambitious thinking, both welcome.
Got something
worth building?
Tell us what you're working on. You'll get an honest answer about whether we can help, and exactly how.
Prefer email? hello@saigon.digital