Dane Carlson: Who Am I?

Hello everyone. My name is Dane Carlson, I'm the host and publisher of Econ Dev Show, and the CEO of Sitehunt.

I previously served as Director of Economic Development for Galveston County, Texas. Before that, I lived just outside Yosemite National Park in central California.

From 2001 to 2015, I was a professional blogger in the small business, startup, and entrepreneurship space. Through that work, I helped entrepreneurs worldwide connect ideas, capital, and execution. In fact, I was writing about economic development before most people had even heard the word “blog”: back when we still called them “weblogs.”

After selling my blog network in 2015, I "retired a little" at 39 and decided to focus locally. Our small town had charm, but not much of a business climate. Located on the route to a major tourist destination, it saw 500,000+ cars pass through every year. I thought we could capture some of that opportunity. I jumped into chamber and economic development work, attended OU EDI, and helped local entrepreneurs pivot from serving only the community to serving all those visitors.

Our efforts began to move the needle and even won awards, but changing a small-town mindset is hard, and California wildfires made it even harder. By 2018, after years of evacuations and local politics, my family and I moved to Texas, where economic development wasn’t a dirty word, and where everything didn’t catch fire every summer.

That brought me to Galveston County, where I built one of the only county-level economic development programs in Texas. I focused on attraction marketing and recruitment, landing several multi-billion dollar industrial projects, including two that ranked among the top five in the state.

In 2023, I left the county to found Sitehunt, a web-based software platform that automates the work I once did manually.