About the founder
Founder & Developer
Our founder is Nikki Quinn Baker, but most people call him Nick. He was raised in Florida, and he has always embraced adventure and thought beyond conventional boundaries. When faced with a 'no,' he consistently found alternative paths to the outcome he wanted.
Growing up, he spent countless hours playing Xbox, where he first learned to modify code and taught others how to do the same with their mods. That early curiosity about how things work behind the scenes is what ultimately motivated him to start a digital marketing agency.
Ctrl Shift Run.
We are a digital marketing agency. We develop custom websites with Next.js and manage Google Ads campaigns.
The name comes from a keyboard shortcut. Holding Ctrl+Shift while opening a taskbar-pinned application launches it in administrative mode - overriding the default permissions. It's a fitting metaphor for what we do: helping ambitious brands move past the limitations of templated tools and generic software, and building the kind of infrastructure that lets them scale without permission.
What Ctrl Shift Run does
Ctrl Shift Run is a digital marketing agency in Clearwater, Florida. We do two things: we build custom websites, and we manage Google Ads campaigns. Both come from the same belief, that a business should understand what it is paying for and should own what gets built for it.
Websites are custom built from the ground up in Next.js and TypeScript. We do not use WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, Shopify, or page builders, because templates are slower, harder to maintain, and impossible to fully own. Each site is built around the way the business actually runs, whether that is a simple site with a contact form, an online store, or a full admin system for a team.
Google Ads management is the other half of the work. We run intent-based Search campaigns in an account that belongs to you, aimed at people who are already searching for what you offer, and we review the search terms every month so the budget keeps going to the searches that matter.
What you can expect from us
Fixed prices
Custom websites start at $1,000. You get one price, agreed before any work begins, and you are never billed by the hour.
You own the work
Your project lives in your GitHub repository and your domain stays in your name. If you ever part ways with us, the entire codebase goes with you.
Plain answers
We explain what we are doing and why, without jargon. When you reach out, you hear back from us within one business day, not from an autoresponder.
Results you can check
Every build targets green PageSpeed Insights scores on mobile and desktop, plus 3/3 on the agentic browsing check. You can run the test yourself, on our own site too.
What a project looks like
- Step 01
A score walkthrough
We run your current site through Google PageSpeed Insights and show you exactly where it stands.
- Step 02
A short call
A free conversation about your business and what the new site actually needs to do.
- Step 03
A fixed-price proposal
One clear price and timeline for the build, agreed before any work begins.
- Step 04
The build and handoff
We build the site from the ground up, install Google Tag Manager, configure GA4, and verify Google Search Console before handoff, then the code goes into your repository.
Google Ads projects start differently. The first month is mostly setup, testing, and cutting wasted searches. After that we review the search terms every month and adjust as the results come in. Management is a month-to-month membership, and cancelling takes 30 days' notice.
Businesses we have built for
The portfolio covers a wide range of businesses, and each one started with a different problem. A few of them:
- Icon Golf Carts of Tampa Bay, a golf cart dealer with three showrooms, run from a custom admin, inventory, and CRM backend
- The Perna Group, a Las Vegas real estate team with 15 neighborhood and area pages
- Pearce's Plumbing Services, a 24/7 plumbing company serving Pinellas County
- Bluegrass Water Treatments, a family-owned water treatment company with 16 city pages across Central Kentucky
- Buncha Vets, a veteran-owned apparel store with Stripe checkout, donations, and memberships
- Goss Fine Arts, an online gallery for the estate of a painter, with about 118 artworks
We also build for ourselves. Lygofast is Nick's own EDM music project, and The Cat Lovers is a community forum we built and still operate. Running our own projects keeps us close to the same tools we use for clients. See Lygofast and The Cat Lovers.
We also write plain-language guides on the topics we work with every day, from search engine optimization and PageSpeed scores to Stripe payments and Supabase backends. Read the articles or see the full portfolio.
Based in Clearwater, working across the country
We are based in Clearwater, Florida, and take on clients across the Tampa Bay area and the rest of the United States. The quickest way to start is a call or a message. Tell us about your business and we will tell you honestly what it needs.