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

With 29 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

CONTROVERSIAL: If you're ready to create an internet/mobile based startup in 2026, you do not need investment. What's that I hear: "but there are a few setup and running costs". Well, no shit Sherlock! That's how business works.

If you expect it to be a free ride and for someone else to take the risk before you've even started, this game aint for you. Your idea, your risk.

Five years ago, sure, it was tough back then. You needed the app ready just to discover if there was even a market. And the developers who would build it saw you coming and demanded £150k just to get out of bed.

But those days are over. Building your MVP is cheap. Signing up to a handful of AI-driven marketing/growth platforms is even cheaper. Your costs for getting from day 0 to day 1 are minimal, and should come out of your pocket.

If your savings account can't cover it, then give up Netflix, or your 2nd annual holiday, or a meal out and bottle of wine each week.

Take your own risks if you are so convinced the idea is that great. And, according to page 17 of your pitchdeck, it is going to be massive and hit a $1bn market within 5 years!

So what's a year without Netflix or dining out when that's the goal? You will be too busy building and making sales for a social life anyway.

Investment is for scaling. Not for creating the damn thing on day 1.

---

* smallprint: yes, sure, we know that if you're in quantum something or other, or deeptech, or need a van to deliver your mince pies to factories, or to buy stock, or do medical research, [or insert 1,000 other ideas], then you are special and this post does not apply to you. So please, walk on by, nothing for you to see here. This is for people building apps, websites and stuff like that.

Launch your MVP in 30 days | 30yrs in startups (exited. 0→£mil * 2)

I just read an expert's idea of a "5 yr plan for startups". More theoretical tosh! As a founder you need to be out in much less than 5 yrs, sat on the beach with a piña colada, and planning your next startup.

Let's be honest, for most founders, if you are still in at the 5 year mark, you've probably missed the exit ramp and are a zombie startup, kidding yourself you're still capable of "scaling" and reaching mythical unicorn status.

The speed of startups in this mad new AI-backed world means, if the business is doing well at 2-3 years, you should find someone bigger who knows how to launch it into the next orbit. For most founders, this is not you.

Exit at 2-3 years. Low £millions. Go again. Repeat until the care home calls.

Oh, and by the way, that exit money needs to be hard cash. And it goes to founders only - no investors to take any cream off the top.

If you spent 6-12 months of those 2-3 years faffing about finding an investor, then you've wasted the most critical period of a startup's early life.

You can disagree all you like, and spend half your days on here, talking the talk and arguing with AI-written posts.

The startup process is simple: Build, sell, sell-out.

If any part fails, then pivot or find a new idea, and go again.

JFDI !

Hey Linkedin algorithm, send this to everyone subscribed to my newsletter. Ask them to let me know if I should start writing it again.

Hey all, I've just remembered I have this newsletter. It was set up about 300 years ago, and somehow it has collected 6,720 of you 😊 So my big questi

Open article: Hello, is anybody seeing this? by Steve Procter • 1 min read

Startup circus 'experts' say "build it and they will come" is wrong. Really? Post daily on social, grow your followers & fans, then give them a little nudge when you launch something new. Watch them come. Selling has never been easier.

Someone asked me if they should create a business plan, pitchdeck, and financial projection for their brand new startup and app idea? My answer is simple: Hell no! Real founders fly by the seat of their pants.

Sure, write down a few pages of ideas and notes. But otherwise, just focus on building, making sales, and pivoting.

That last one, pivoting, is what makes too much planning a complete waste of time. Don't kid yourselves your idea is so solid you won't need to. You will be pivoting so much, you'll feel like a ballerina practicing her pirouettes.

So stop talking the talk. That's what Linkedin armchair experts do.

It's time to build fast and make sales. Which is what real founders do.

I saw this post recently: "has anyone managed to create a profitable startup yet from vibe coding?" Such a stupid question. AI-assisted dev doesn't make sales, that's your job. But it does help you start selling much sooner.

Oh good grief! Can we stop blaming AI dev tools whenever we see a crappy vibe coded app. Platforms like Replit are fantastic and work great when you know how to control them and feed them the right information. But if you don't, then, as us old-schoolers like to say: Garbage In, Garbage Out.

Blip

Smart advertising to develop an audience of qualified buyers.

DM to discuss self-serve or done-for-you options!

Chief Operating Officer

VP of Business Operations

Director of Strategy & Operations

Evergreen | Scale-up Business Operations

The operating framework for growth stage companies

Operator & Founder

Lucid

Head of Government (from zero to one)

Developed, tested, and implemented growth strategies through new products, markets, and business partnerships in the tech, S&L, and federal sectors; spun out government vertical.

Business Development

Amazon

Category growth on amazon.ca for Electronics, Music, Camera, and Home Entertainment categories.

Sr. Marketplace Operations Manager

RLDP

United States Department of Defense

Army/Special Analytic Missions Division (SAM-D)

Army/Defense Counter Terrorism Center (DCTC)

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

A member of teams that:
✅ Reversed a $560k/mo deficit to achieve profitability at a Series A startup
✅ 3x'd revenue ($XXM) at a B2B company without increasing headcount
✅ Drove a SaaS startup's ARR from $20M👉$100M
✅ Scaled int'l SaaS and retail operations at Amazon
✅ Executed on global operations at the Pentagon

Through these experiences I learned about how to achieve predictable, profitable growth.

Now, I teach business operations frameworks for the same to 1-2 Series A/B companies per month.

Discover our options to work together at the link in my profile header.

------

Every startup experiences similar operational challenges with scaling after the first 3-5 years of💲

Even for the best founders, going from startup mode to the Growth Stage is messy.

It requires a whole new operational cadence.

One that solves for:

⬇️ Inadequate focus on processes and accountability
⬇️ Lack of visibility into progress on key initiatives
⬇️ Board members probing down in the weeds
⬇️ Misalignment among the leadership team
⬇️ Lack of concert across departments
⬇️ Priorities not held in common
➡️ WEAK EXECUTION
⬆️ Frequent priority list changes
⬆️ Low confidence in hitting targets
⬆️ Unwise stewardship of funds raised
⬆️ Allowing ad hoc fires to control your day
⬆️ Instability thru macroeconomic headwinds
⬆️ Not getting expected return from your key hires

Companies fail to make the transition to Growth Stage because startup grit is simply not enough to cross over and drive scale.

You need to add process, and the right people.

This is especially true in an economic downturn.

--------------------

⬆️ If this hits close to home, let's chat.

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Please note that like you, I also have a full-time job leading execution and efficiency through a recession.

That is part of the value prop though because it means that these systems are current: tried, tested, and continually optimized as the market evolves...

...instead of just a "playbook" for miscellaneous things that have worked for someone in the past. 

While it is a huge part of the value prop, it also, however, limits my capacity for consulting so I do say no more than yes, and only work with right fits.

Learn more about the three specific ways I can help you at the link in my profile header.

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Cleared (TS/SCI)

RJ Schultz

Burger King's Moldy Whopper scored 36% below category norms on "desire."

26% of viewers said it reduced their purchase intent. On a dashboard, it looked like a disaster.

McDonald's marketing is pure stillness. Same arches, same jingle, same promise in Times Square. When you're the category default, you don't surprise people. You reassure them.

Burger King doesn't have that luxury. Try to out-safe the safest brand in fast food, and you lose before you start.

So Burger King stopped trying.

They filmed a Whopper decomposing for 30+ days and put it on billboards. They built an AR app that sets McDonald's ads on fire (point your phone at a competitor's billboard, watch it burn, get a free Whopper). It drove app downloads and sales.

The Moldy Whopper generated 8.4 billion impressions, a 400% jump in "no artificial preservatives" awareness, tens of millions in earned media, and a 14% sales lift where it ran. Every norm it violated became a headline. Every headline became distribution their media budget couldn't buy.

The rotting burger needs you to remember "their food is real enough to rot” the next time you’re deciding between them and the Golden Arches.

-------

Most marketers confuse two things:

Attention: Did someone look at this once?

Recognition: When they're hungry later, do they remember it was us?

The first is easy to measure. The second is where profit lives.

COO @ Blip: boost brand recognition and recall with smart OOH

Chick-fil-A never really went viral. For 30 years, the same billboards showed up in the same cities, to the same commuters. Most look at the cows and see creativity, but they’re wrong.

In 1995, Chick-fil-A tested a billboard in Atlanta: two cows painting on a blank board.

Then they committed.

The first impression doesn't spur action, but the seventh to the same person does.

And that's what Chick-fil-A figured out.

At Blip, we formalized this into a metric: Qualified Impressions

A Qualified Impression is the 7th exposure to the same person, within 90 days.

Everything before that is just rent you pay to get into memory.

The cows became one of the most recognized campaigns in fast food not because they spiked, but because they compounded.

It's how random attention becomes "Oh yeah, them."

They'd see a giant pink rectangle on the freeway. No logo. No Margot Robbie. Sometimes nothing but a tiny release date in the corner. Almost everyone who saw it knew it was Barbie.

So what in this is replicable for normal brands?

—

Hint, it's not: "Clever! We should do minimalist color-block billboards."

Because that’s copying the visible tactic while missing the invisible precondition that actually made it work:

Brand recall that came from strong, distinctive assets. Where color became a kind of coded system that helped people notice and remember. 

Distinctive assets work through repetition, not creativity alone.

Barbie's genius wasn't the pink billboard.

It was having years of "Barbie pink" drilled into people's brains before the campaign even started -- on toys, packaging, TV, and spin-offs. By 2023, that color code was already sitting in memory.

A color doing the job of copy, imagery, and logo all at once is what it looks like when a brand asset matures to the point of near-instant recall.

When Warner Bros lit up those boards, they activated recognition that already existed.

Pick one simple asset. Overcommit to it for an uncomfortably long time. Let your OOH drive repetition and recall. Let the same buyers see it enough times that it stops being "new" and starts being "you."

Most brands will never do this. Not because it's expensive, but because their creative team will tap out long before their customers' brains even notice.

Only years of consistency made this spectacle possible.

Netflix opened a portal to the Upside Down at the Empire State Building. People hunted it down, stood in front of it, and filmed themselves.

That single stunt generated more content than a month of paid ads.

BACKGROUND:

Most brands try to be everywhere instead of being from somewhere.

Netflix does it differently.

When Stranger Things 4 returned, they opened “rifts” at real landmarks. Empire State Building. Bondi Beach. Specific coordinates where the portals felt plausible.

Fans went hunting, found them, and documented everything.

For Wednesday, they sent a live-action Thing scuttling around New York sidewalks. It startled pedestrians. The kind of moment you had to be there for, but still worked perfectly on video.

With Squid Game, they placed the Young-hee doll at parks and malls. Strangers gathered to play red light green light in front of it, filming each other the whole time.

Three campaigns. Same pattern.

The location made the creative plausible. The creative gave people something to do. The phones did the rest.

——

The Netflix Method breaks down to 3 constraints:

1. Native placement

The creative only makes sense there. A portal by a landmark. A doll in a park. If you could move it anywhere, it's just another ad.

2. Simple reactivity

The ad responds to something local. Motion, weather, time of day. People just film it.

3. A role for the passer-by

There's something to do. Find it, stand in it, play with it. You're not watching the ad. You're in it.

——

LESSON:

Netflix didn't win OOH by outspending everyone.

They won by enforcing those three constraints.

You don't need portals at the Empire State Building to run this playbook.

You need a few good spots and several weeks.

Pick a location where your creative makes sense. Write one line that name-checks the street or references something only locals would know.

Add one reactive element. Weather. Time of day. The home team's score.

Give people something to film. A marked spot to stand in. A question they answer. A moment they're part of.

Small brands with small budgets can turn commuters into their content team if they stop trying to be everywhere and commit to being from somewhere.

Context does half the work. The audience does the rest.

Most billboards brag about the product. Canva's billboards brag about the pain. "Make the logo bigger." "16x9 was supposed to be 9x16." The feature is the punchline, not the headline. And that's the trick.

Here's how to apply it:

1. Saturate one hub

Most campaigns try to graze as many people as possible once. Canva did the opposite. Multiple billboards in one corridor. Same commuters passing them every single day. Research shows attitudes peak around 8-10 exposures. Recognition switches on somewhere around the 7th impression. One saturated hub beats ten cities sprinkled.

2. Lead with the pain

Every Canva board freezes a moment their ICP has actually lived through. The "oh no" moment. The Slack fire drill. The sweaty palms. Every designer knows what "make the logo bigger" feels like.

3. Make the feature the punchline

Canva bolted a real bike to a billboard to sell "drag and drop almost anything." Framed text to appear sideways to sell Magic Resize. Each ad becomes a product demo in physical space.

4. Measure activation

You won't get perfect attribution, but you can get a useful signal. Create a url unique to your OOH ads. Of compare activation rate versus a control region with no OOH. Look for higher activation per signup because people hitting your site already know what you solve.


TAKEAWAY

Your ICP’s at-work Inside jokes are a filter.

Use them to become the obvious answer for people who already feel the problem every week.

Start with one uncomfortable question:

What are the three lines your users joke about on Slack that you're too nervous to put on a billboard?

Write those down.

WhatsApp runs billboards across the country with one message: your texts are private. Different creative. Same promise. "No one, not even WhatsApp, can see or hear your personal messages." 

After running billions(!) of billboard ad displays at Blip, we can tell you exactly why this works.

Most marketing teams run feature soup: Six value props. App store badges. Clever taglines.

WhatsApp did the opposite: One sentence. Big letters. Outdoor screens.

Don't miss the formula:

(One Promise) x Frequency = Recall

You can buy ten million impressions and still have a city full of people who can't remember your name.

What actually moves the needle is recognition – the moment someone can recall who you are and what you promise without any help.

Before roughly the seventh exposure, you're just decorating their commute.

After it, everything changes:

- They search your name instead of "best private messenger"
- They tap you in the app store because you feel familiar
- When a friend asks for a safer option, your name comes back instantly

WhatsApp nailed every piece:

- One plain-spoken promise: "Message privately." No jargon. No weasel words. If a commuter can't repeat it after one glance, it's not ready.

- High-trust placements: Billboards feel real. Anchored to physical places. They don't stalk you across the internet.

- Relentless repetition: Same promise, different creative. Bus stops. Everywhere the same people pass multiple times.

And the "Green Bubble / Blue Bubble / Private Bubble" execution is brilliant...

😂 😂 

They took Apple's most famous status symbol and turned it into a privacy argument.

Most brands would sneak feature soup back in "because the inventory is expensive."

Mistake.

Keep it simple.

Your biggest risk isn't that people never form a clear memory of your promise at all.

They hear it once in a feed they don't trust. It vanishes.

Two words on a billboard, seven times, beats a thousand impressions that never stick.

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