Wilmington entrepreneur Jack Fleming is known to much of the North Carolina startup ecosystem—as the Founder of Socialry Marketing, as one of the driving forces behind the presence of 1 Million Cups in Wilmington, and, for lack of a better term, as an independent photojournalist for startup and tech events statewide.
Now, Fleming is focusing more of his energy on his second startup in an effort to address some of the inefficiencies he’s encountered amidst his other ventures.
Specifically, as a marketer doing work for clients across multiple industries—from construction to real estate and IT to alcohol sales—Fleming found himself constantly reading newsletters, scanning additional news sources and tracking trends in an active effort to stay informed. The process was fragmented and repetitive, requiring him to sift through dozens of sources, verify information across them and often spend time on content that wasn’t ultimately useful.
Over time, he realized that what was missing was a streamlined means of gathering, filtering, and trusting industry insights without having to invest significant time on tedious manual research.
“Marketers are spending anywhere from 8 to 15 hours per week doing research,” Fleming said, “And that is not even including content development.”
To solve that problem, Fleming created Phrayz, an industry intelligence tool designed to streamline how marketing and sales teams gather and use insights. The tool aggregates information from a wide range of sources, filters it based on relevance, and delivers curated, trustworthy intelligence in one place, eliminating hours of hands-on research time.
Gathering news and creating content
Phrayz pulls together content from email newsletters and, more recently, the Google News API, enabling it to curate fresh, up-to-date news collections. The platform’s AI-powered folder ingests around 190 sources per week. It then applies guardrails to filter and structure that information such that it ultimately delivers clean, summarized insights within organized folders.
“Basically, we are trying create these folders on our backend and use our proprietary algorithms and prompting, and then hand you all the information that’s there,” Fleming said. “We’ll still list out what’s going through it just [so our users know] these are trustworthy sources, but you don’t have to do the grunt work of finding great sources too.”
Beyond aggregation, Phrayz is also designed to turn information into usable content. Once insights are collected and organized, the platform uses AI to transform them into structured outputs like blog outlines, video scripts and social media content.
Rather than generating fully finished posts, the tool focuses on giving users a strong starting point. The goal is to reduce the time spent going from research to creation, while still leaving room for human input and refinement.
“We’re not trying to make full-blown AI content,” Fleming said. “It’s more about starting the process—giving you a really strong baseline that you can build from.”
By combining multiple sources into a single, filtered view, the platform also helps ensure that content is informed by a broader set of information, rather than relying on a single input or prompt. Furthermore, users can customize outputs based on their brand, tone and audience, adding another layer of specificity.
In practice, this means marketers can move from insight to execution much faster, using aggregated intelligence as the foundation for more relevant, higher-quality content.
Phrayz is designed to be as simple as possible. Marketers input basic details and select their industries to start, and then get curated insights and content starting points.
Early success and what’s next
Currently, Phrayz is in its beta phase with over 100 users. Early adopters range from small agencies to marketing leaders, with smaller agencies, like Fleming’s own, being the heaviest target audience.
“Whether you’re in one industry and you’re a CMO, just trying to stay up to date with things that you’re doing in your marketing industry, or you’re an agency that’s handling different client accounts, it’s helpful for both parties,” Fleming said.
QUICK BITS
Startup: Phrayz
Founder: Jack Fleming
Founded: 2025
Team size: 2
Location: Wilmington
Website: phrayz.com
Funding: Bootstrapped
Fleming uses Phrayz to streamline his research, surfacing relevant information for the day through the tool he built. He said this has freed up time for higher-return work like metric reporting and client meetings. Phrayz also improves the quality of his content by making information more relevant and efficient, helping retain clients longer.
In the next year, the startup aims to continue iterating with the product. The near-term goal is to reach 1,000 paid users. Those interested in trying Phrayz for themselves can currently book a demo on the company’s website.
