The team behind Upriver.
We are a small team. Joshua runs the practice and shoots the content, Anne Marie builds the web work, and Megan keeps every project moving. You get a real team without the agency overhead, and the people you meet are the people who do the work.
Why Upriver exists
The team
Founder
Joshua Brown
Joshua is a photographer and filmmaker who has shot over 500 weddings at more than 50 venues across the Hudson Valley and Catskills, and has run his own small business for 25 years.
Before photography, he was an Apple Creative. A couple of years ago he started building AI tools and automations for his own business: content, lead response, SEO, automated workflows. It worked, other owners noticed, and Upriver grew out of it. He writes the strategy, builds the systems, and shoots the video.
Web Development
Anne Marie
Anne Marie builds the code: the Clone and Rebuild work in clean Next.js or Astro, hosting, and the technical SEO and AEO that make a site fast, stable, and findable.
She turns the design and SEO plan into a site you own as code, in a repo with your name on it, then makes sure it keeps running.
Operations
Megan
Megan keeps the work moving. She handles onboarding, scheduling, document collection, and the day-to-day communication that makes a small operation run like a much bigger one.
She is usually your first point of contact, the bridge between you and the rest of the team, and the reason projects land on time.
And one more
Claude
We are not joking. Claude (made by Anthropic) is the AI that powers everything we build for clients. It drafts content, runs the audits, responds to inquiries, writes the code, and plans the work. We treat it like a team member because that is what it is, a tireless one that does not need a lunch break and never forgets your brand voice.
Read more about how Claude fits into the workWhy a small team beats an agency here
Agencies have project managers, account executives, junior strategists, and a rotating cast of contractors you never meet. The person you talk to in the sales meeting is rarely the person doing the work. By the time your money reaches the people executing, half of it has gone to overhead.
We do not work that way. The people who pitch you are the people who do the work, and we have worked together on real projects for years. Nobody is learning on your dime.
You get senior-level work from a team that already knows how to work together. That is the whole pitch.
Start a conversation
The best way to see if this is a fit is to talk. Twenty minutes, free, no pitch deck.