I help founders get ready and connect with investors • Seasoned entrepreneur • Building tech startups for 25yrs (zero→£mil ARR, twice)

With 30 years in startups, I now run the Gipity AI Dev Studio: Expert help to launch your MVP in 30 days. www.gipity.com

𝐌𝐲 𝐡𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐫𝐲... 👇

1968 BC (Before Computers): Born into analogue world

1982-86: Discovered computers! Vic 20, BBC micro, ICL 2900 mainframe & more

1986-89: Computation degree, UMIST (University of Manchester, Institute of Science & Technology)

1989-99: IT consultant/project manager: Logica, IBM, Reuters, Bankers Trust & Deutsche Bank

1994-97: first side hustle: scuba diving instructor & own London dive school

1996: published first website & first ever disk-mounted website on a UK magazine cover

1999: developer/project manager at 2 early London digital agencies

1999: vision/architect/investor. created first UK under-a-tenner domain name business, Easily

1999: built+launched early/successful dot-com: domain/email/web hosting ISP

1999-2001: ceo. managed growth from 0 to 2,000 daily domain sales & 30+ staff in under 2yrs

2000: invented the web-based DNS dashboard for domains

2000: created early no-code solution for one-page websites: £100k ARR

2000: highly commended "Entrepreneur of the Year": European E-commerce Association E-business 2000 awards

2001: 64th in Sunday Times "Top 100 pre-IPO e-businesses in Europe" E-League

2001: ran one of the first successful web affiliate schemes, generating 40% of rev

2004: hit 400,000+ domain registrations, 30,000+ websites & 40,000+ email accounts

2004: 3,500 commission earning affiliates & word of mouth to 100,000+ customers

2004: negotiated successful multi-million pound dot-com exit/sale of Easily

2002: vision/investor. launched one of the first ever B2B mobile text marketing services: SMS Expert

2007-11: early digital nomad: B2B Saas startup from beach/desert

2007-19: ceo. ran leading text marketing B2B Saas: zero to multi-million turnover

2007-19: cto/architect. developed 850k lines of code & supported 1mil daily transactions/API calls

2020... consultancy/advice/support for early-stage tech startup founders

2022... helping hand-picked founders find the right investors

• 2018: vision/architect/investor/cto...
Clickacall: instant video calls from anywhere with single click
Nearevo: proximity discovery for internet of things
Scan+Click: contactless business cards
Secly: personal online security

• 2021 l2o: supporting next generation of startups
• 2022 Venture Cards: all startups, in one place • connecting the right founders and investors

• 2024 The Gipity AI Dev Studio: Expert help to launch your MVP in 30 days

Steve Procter

After 30 years in startups, with the last 5 helping other founders, I've realised there are other more established businesses out there. Who knew! Apparently, some even have actual budgets to get stuff done 🤣

So, as much as I love founders, it's time to spread my wings and help build apps, tools, AI agents and lots more useful stuff for all these other exciting companies and business people. (founders still very welcome, obvs)

And of course, doing it all using my new found love of AI-assisted development for speed and power. Plus 44 years of coding and engineering experience to guide things along the way.

A year ago, tech cost the earth to create, and developers would take 3-6 months to give you something basic. But with AI, the world has moved on.

What kind of app, internal tool or AI agent could you use today to save a tonne of time and money in your business?

DM, or comment below. I'll provide a free evaluation to get things started.

I’ll build your AI agents & apps | 44yrs in tech | Exited founder (0→£mil * 2)

"Code" is sooooo old fashioned. I've got an old web app I built 10 years ago. just got 1 client who uses it these days. I only think about it for 10 mins every year when I send him an invoice.

A server update created a bug today. I had to go into the code and debug. It was really, really weird - not seen this code in over 5 years.

It felt like walking through a museum.

Did people really used to write this weird language called "code" to make their computers do things in the olden days.

Startup ideas that are too early are brutal. I've been there several times and got the t-shirt. Quite literally, as back in the noughties, printing t-shirts and business cards, and paying for fancy logo designs before you'd even launched was just what you did.

But I'd never put a founder off trying if you have a mad idea in your head.

Because very often, nobody really knows. After 30 years in startups, I've realised that timing is just plain weird.

Something can appear in the zeitgeist on a random Tuesday that wasn't there last week, and will be gone again if you don't launch for another 3 months.

The difference now is you don't need permission, investment, or 6-12 months to build and test it.

It has never been cheaper or faster to build a small, real app and put it in front of people.

Don't overthink it. Cut it down. Ship something real. Then let the market slap you (gently) across the face and tell you what it thinks.

Your gut matters. But the market is the only judge that counts.

If you're sitting on an idea right now, stop polishing it and let's get the first real version built and launched.

You never know.

I heard a very powerful line yesterday, by Olivia Moore at a16z:

"Humans Are for Ideas, AI Is for Execution"

As long as we, as individuals and societies, hold to this belief, then we will continue to have purpose.

The moment we start letting AI take control of the creative juices, it's game over.

Pure chat-based GPT usage in businesses will begin a steady drop. AI agents are where it's at - always on, always working for you, 24/7. Not just politely responding if you ask it stuff, otherwise sitting silently in the corner.

What are AI Agents and Automations? To answer, let me ask you a question:

If you are a business owner, consultant, operator or founder, what's one recurring job you'd like taken off your plate?

Something repetitive, annoying, time-consuming, easy to get wrong, or just plain old boring.

• Not "run my whole business".
• Not "take over my entire marketing outreach".
• Not "do everything".

One thing.

If you claim to love every single task you do (really?), ask a colleague or your assistant. I bet there is something.

That "something" is the best way to understand what an Automation is:

It's simply a workflow that you already have in your business, and currently driven by a human. You know the steps or can easily define them, and you have instructions, a system, and a set of tools that execute them.

And that's what we can automate using technology, removing or hugely reducing the need for that human involvement at every time-consuming step. By the way, these tech-driven automations often don't require AI.

An AI Agent on the other hand, takes your automation and does a lot more. It can execute your workflow with its own judgement. Driven by AI means you can give it an objective, let it figure out the steps (within constraints), use tools, and adapt when things change.

Neither are magic robots. They're just tools (AI-powered or not) that can sit in the cloud, connect to the right systems (docs, email, calendars, call transcripts, your CRM or other internal systems, or whatever), and take over the mundane in your business.

A few years ago, they were out of reach of many small businesses. But with AI-assisted development, experienced builders can now create these at a much lower cost and faster than ever before.

For now, it is likely they will still be overseen by a human supervisor. But think of the hours saved every single week, and imagine what you or your team could do with that time back.

Yes, you can make AI a grand vision. But in the real world you and your business occupy, it often starts with one annoying task that quietly drains your time and energy.

Tell me the task you want to get rid of, and I'll tell you if it's actually a good candidate for tech automations and AI agents.

COO @ Blip | Amazon Alum | Business Ops architect for Series A startups

Blip is the first marketplace for digital billboards on-demand. Connecting advertisers with billboard owners has turned a rigid industry into something flexible and accessible. We replaced year-long contracts and minimums with on-demand access.

Through thousands of campaigns, we kept seeing the same pattern: traditional and digital channels don't compete. When you use them together properly, they multiply one other. Most marketing conversations still treat channels separately, missing how they are supposed to work as a system.

The data is clear: when properly integrated into a full-funnel approach, out-of-home advertising doesn't just add to digital performance—it multiplies it.

Our focus is helping growth-stage companies build full-funnel strategy and understand how awareness channels interact with conversion tactics. We work with the psychological principles behind it all. When you get the approach right, the results follow.

Happy to talk if you're working through channel strategy, attribution, or how out-of-home fits into modern marketing.

RJ Schultz

Listen Labs had a $25,000 marketing budget. They spent a fifth of it on one billboard with no branding, just five clusters of numbers. 

It generated 5 million social impressions, a Sam Altman reply, and coverage in VentureBeat, Forbes, and CBS News.

CEO Alfred Wahlforss had $5,000 for one billboard. He called it "a moment of desperation." Most founders in that position try to maximize reach. Wahlforss went the other direction - he narrowed the audience to almost no one.

Plain white board. Black text: {64659, 123310, 75584, 8138, 38271}. No logo, no company name. The numbers were AI tokens. Run them through a tokenizer and they decoded into a URL leading to a coding challenge.

The challenge mirrored Listen Labs' actual production problem. Their product selects which customers from a 30-million-person panel to interview. The coding puzzle was that algorithm in miniature. Candidates were auditioning by solving the real thing.

10,000 decoded the tokens. 1,000 attempted the challenge. 430 cracked it. 60 solved it fully and got interviews.

Gabriel Petersson, an OpenAI research scientist, posted a photo on X and triggered the cascade. Sam Altman replied. A Menlo Ventures partner hit the leaderboard. The billboard was designed so that the first person to crack it would have exactly the right audience to make it spread.

Everything after the billboard - press, social impressions, recruiting pipeline - came from the design, not the placement.

Four months later, Listen Labs closed a $69 million Series B at a $500 million valuation.

Coinbase spent $14 million on a Super Bowl QR code for a similar approach. Listen Labs spent $5,000.

COO @ Blip | Adkom: recognition & recall with smart OOH

A startup with under $1M in revenue and a product its own CEO called "complete trash" plastered 50 bus shelters across San Francisco with three words: Stop Hiring Humans.

The CEO received thousands of death threats. He also had his two biggest revenue months ever.

Most people fixate on the messaging. But Artisan ran the same messaging at a TechCrunch booth and it flopped. Fifty bus shelters simultaneously tipped people from "I saw an ad" to "something is happening around me."

Artisan's team seeded Reddit with photos of their own ads before the shelters even went up. Smart amplification, but the underlying mechanic was still saturation: the same message in enough contexts that it became unavoidable.

There's a concept called a Qualified Impression: the 7th impression to the same person within 90 days. That's when someone stops seeing your ad and starts recalling who you are. 

When 85% of your target is at that threshold, you're spending on people ready to buy.

Most businesses running OOH - home services, personal injury, franchise owners - don't need death threats to hit that threshold. They need frequency and creative worth sending to a friend.

When Brex ran outbound sales after launching their billboard campaign, prospects kept saying the same thing: "I already saw your billboard."

The email got the attribution credit.
The SDR got the attribution credit.

The billboard is the reason the email got opened.

At a fireside chat a while back, Brex CEO Henrique Dubugras asked the audience to guess what the campaign cost. Someone said $2-3 million. Actual number: $300k. The audience gasped.

Jet-black backgrounds, white text: "The First Corporate Card for Startups." No QR code. No phone number.

Former CRO Sam Blond's rule: your first campaign should be under eight words and explain what your product does. Don't get creative until your audience knows who you are.

The strategy was frequency over reach. Dubugras estimated 40% of potential customers were concentrated in San Francisco. So a prospect sees your billboard on their commute, another outside their lunch spot, a bus shelter walking to their car. To them, that company is everywhere.

That frequency made every other channel work harder. Blond described the effect: "Every time I told someone where I worked - potential customers, investors, candidates - they all would say 'I see your billboards EVERYWHERE.'" …but the attribution dashboard never showed it.

Billboards are not magic. We run the largest (only) digital billboard marketplace in America and I'll tell you that directly. What Brex got right was the match between channel and audience.

That match doesn't require a Bay Area zip code. Medical device companies cluster in Minneapolis. Oil and gas firms cluster in Houston. Insurance carriers cluster in Hartford. Franchises with 40 locations in a metro have customers driving the same roads every day. Wherever your audience is geographically dense, frequency gets dramatically cheaper.

Brex spent $300K and made a city think they were a billion-dollar company. Four months later, they were. In January 2026, Capital One acquired them for $5.15 billion.

Your SDR is closing deals right now that started at a bus shelter. The only question is whether it was yours or your competitor's.

Liquid Death tested demand before building inventory. They ran social ads for "tallboy cans of mountain water that murder your thirst" to see if people would try to buy. When they did, Liquid Death spun up an Amazon listing and the rest is history.

Here's the system behind their success story:

1. They picked a sharp contrast in a boring category.

Bottled water meant mountain yoga retreats or minimalist wellness. Blue gradients, snowcaps, condensation.

Liquid Death did the opposite. Tall aluminum cans that look like beer. Gothic typography. A skull logo. "Murder Your Thirst" and "Death to Plastic."

You don't read a Liquid Death can from 20 feet away. You recognize it.

2. They designed OOH knowing your phone is the real audience.

People in skeleton costumes spinning fire at traffic lights. Murals painted on alley walls. A pop-up spa installation.

One Texas activation: 320,000 impressions because people filmed it.

The stunt creates videos people want to share, not just impressions on a spreadsheet. When you run OOH in the same markets as your digital ads, people move from "I've seen this" to "I know this brand" way faster.

3. They stacked impressions toward recognition, not just reach.

At Blip, we define a qualified impression as roughly the seventh time someone sees your brand in 90 days. That's when you're in their head at purchase.

The viral videos get you the first few impressions. The OOH reinforces it. By the time you're at Whole Foods, you grab the skull can without thinking.

4. They committed to entertainment over targeting.

They're not slicing audiences into 84 micro-segments. They're asking: "Will this make people laugh enough to share it?"

Most brands would never greenlight a "Greatest Hates" album of angry customer comments or a Tony Hawk skateboard painted with his actual blood. Liquid Death did both.

5. They stayed radically consistent for years.

Most teams try edgy creative once, then go back to normal. Or they buy one wild billboard as a stunt, then never mention it again.

The skull, the can, the name - those assets register in peripheral vision when you're half-distracted because they've been relentlessly repeated.

6. They measured the invisible things anyway.

Brands that play this game well track what moves beneath the surface: branded search lift in campaign cities, store traffic during campaign windows, social sharing of creative, and how much more efficient downstream media becomes in markets where the brand is already in people's heads.

Messier than last-click attribution. Closer to how humans actually decide.

Most brands can't hire fire spinners. But they can pick one sharp visual contrast and repeat it everywhere. Design their trucks or booths knowing phones are watching. Stack local presence until recognition becomes a reflex.

You don't have to "murder" anything in your slogan. But you do have to stop treating every impression like it matters equally.

Stytch attributed over 10% of new sales opportunities directly to billboards and bus ads. One prospect told the team their CEO saw a billboard in SF and knew they were done with Auth0.

Most people who saw those ads had no idea what they meant.

That was by design.

Stytch's first OOH campaign in 2022 took the opposite approach. It was built on something universal: everyone hates passwords.

They turned five transit shelters into 3D art installations, with 25 people hand-writing 5,000 sticky notes with bad passwords across four marathon sessions. 

Week one: 83% web traffic increase, 257% jump in clicks. Shortlisted for an OBIE Award alongside Nike and Disney+.

It worked. Then in 2024, Stytch deliberately stopped trying to be understood by everyone.

221 ad units timed to peak developer conference season. Placements mapped to target sales accounts and commuting routes. Creative featured GitHub-style code diffs, CAPTCHA themes, and lines like git commit -m "auth, simplified".

If you weren't an authentication developer, you'd walk right past.

As Division of Labor put it: "Yes, it is good that the majority of people don't understand your advertising. As long as the people you want to talk to understand."

The 2024 results: 25%+ uplift in branded search. 70%+ increase in search clicks globally. A 10-15% uplift that persisted even after the billboards came down.

Twilio acquired Stytch in October 2025. The campaigns that built that brand didn't try to speak to everyone.

They made the right people feel like insiders.

Most people remember Rippling's 2020 billboard as an attention play. Clever startup, funny poem, big company overreacts.

Attention spikes and fades. What Rippling built was recognition - a specific message that lodged in memory and compounded for six years.

Rippling had raised $50 million. Gusto had raised $516 million.

Rippling rented one billboard on Highway 101. Seven words: "Outgrowing Gusto? Presto change-o. Work Magic." Plus a handful of bus ads.

Gusto sent a cease-and-desist. The billboard came down.

Rippling's General Counsel responded with a legal letter in rhyming couplets. It went viral. But the reason it built recognition and not just buzz is what the poem contained: one verifiable fact. Gusto's own 1,000-person workforce had migrated off Gusto's platform to Workday. Confirmed on the record.

The billboard was exposure one. TechCrunch was two. Business Insider three. LinkedIn shares four. A friend texting you the poem, five.

Within days, their exact target audience had encountered the same message repeatedly from trusted sources - none of it paid. Every exposure carried the same fact.

Rippling's CMO Matt Epstein confirmed on a podcast that people reached out saying "we are outgrowing Gusto." That's recognition converting to pipeline.

When that billboard went up, Rippling was valued at $270 million. They jumped to $1.35 billion shortly after the campaign. Today, $16.8 billion.

The billboard didn't cause all of that. But it established a brand identity - combative, playful, willing to pick fights with companies ten times their size - that has compounded for six years.

The question isn't how many people drove by. It's how many people can still tell you, six years later, that even Gusto outgrew Gusto.

Vanta was approaching $10M ARR when they put their first billboard on Highway 101, timed to hit right before SaaStr Annual 2021. Today they're valued at $4.15 billion. That billboard is still there. They leased it for a decade.

Six words: "Compliance that doesn't SOC 2 much."

SaaStr 2021 was the first major in-person B2B conference since COVID. Five thousand SaaS founders, executives, and 750+ VCs driving the same highway for the first time in over a year, primed for something that felt like the industry was back and having fun again.

And there it was: A pun on a compliance standard only the right people would get. It hit Reddit's r/Accounting with thousands of organic upvotes. VP of Marketing Sarah Scharf said it helped Vanta land their biggest enterprise customer.

As Outfront Media's SF GM put it: "For a lot of the tech firms, they have made it when they have a billboard on the 101." There's a reason. Billboards carry implicit credibility digital can't replicate. People see your brand on one and think, "they must be legit." Brex spent $300K on billboards before even launching and reported 10x performance vs. digital.

At Blip, companies come to us expecting “awareness.” What they find is a force multiplier for every other channel they're running. They don't stay first-timers for long.

Four years later, Vanta came back with "Don't SOC-block Your Best Engineer."

taplio

The Battle

Steve Procter

RJ Schultz

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance ScoreSteve Procter's LinkedIn Performance

Performance ScoreRJ Schultz's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

taplio

The Battle

Steve Procter

RJ Schultz

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Steve Procter's LinkedIn Performance

Performance ScoreRJ Schultz's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

Performance ScoreSteve Procter's LinkedIn Performance