Shaun Merritt is Chief Technology Officer of Single Grain, the Los Angeles, California, digital marketing agency led by Eric Siu, and co-founder and CTO of ClickFlow, Single Grain's AI tool that plans, writes, and reports on SEO content. A self-taught engineer who went to work at startups straight out of high school, he co-founded the language-learning company Toucan before joining Siu to build software products.
Teenage iOS Apps and Pray.com
Merritt started programming as a teenager, building simple iOS apps that each got a little more complex than the last, he told Tony Yang of the venture firm Mucker Capital in a long interview about how he builds software. He went straight into startups instead of college, starting at Pray.com, the faith and prayer app, while still in high school and joining it full time after graduating.
He also worked as an iOS developer at Fair, a car-leasing startup, and a former colleague recommends him on LinkedIn from their shared time at Science Inc., the startup studio, and Pray.com.
Co-founding Toucan
In 2019 Merritt co-founded Toucan with chief executive Taylor Nieman and product chief Brandon Dietz, serving as CTO. Toucan made a Chrome extension for people who want to learn a language without setting aside study time. It swaps some of the words on any English web page into the language the reader is learning, and hovering over a word shows the original. In 2020 Toucan raised $3 million in seed funding led by GSV Ventures, TechCrunch reported, and the language-learning company Babbel acquired it in 2023.
Merritt told Yang that at Toucan he went from building alone to leading a team of engineers, and learned to keep things simple and build what users want. One engineer who worked under him there, Chris Seckler, wrote on LinkedIn that Merritt was "the best manager (CTO) I have ever had."
Karrot and ClickFlow with Eric Siu
After Toucan, Merritt teamed up with Siu around a problem Single Grain's clients kept running into: personalized LinkedIn ads aimed at specific target companies took slow manual work to set up. He first built an internal admin portal that automated campaign creation. When it lifted engagement and lowered costs, the two turned it into Karrot, an AI tool for account-based LinkedIn advertising, with Merritt as co-founder and CTO. He has also been co-founder and CTO of ClickFlow since October 2024.
In the Mucker interview he walked through building Karrot largely by himself in a few months with AI coding tools. He sketched user flows first, then prototyped screens in v0 with plain-English prompts such as "Add a new tab on the sidebar called Website Activity." He used ChatGPT to research outside APIs such as LinkedIn's ad interface, and Claude Code inside Cursor to plan and draft backend features, which in Yang's account got a feature 60 to 70 percent of the way before Merritt finished it by hand. The lesson he took from the build was to spend more time talking with customers and less time building for its own sake.
Volunteering with Defy Ventures
Since 2017 Merritt has volunteered with Defy Ventures, working with people in prison who are training as entrepreneurs to firm up the business models behind their ideas and prepare for pitch competitions. His LinkedIn profile also lists volunteer work with LIFE Animal Rescue and lists Chinese among his languages.