Two weeks in, half of it was outdated. A month in, almost all of it. Models had moved, new tools had landed, better ways of doing the same thing had appeared. The document was a fossil before we’d finished writing it.

We stopped. The workflow wasn’t the point.

The thing that’s actually getting better isn’t our process. It’s our figuring it out.

Last week I had to put together wireframes for an internal session with the team. Timeline shifted, no time to do them the way I usually do. So I improvised. Dumped every bit of context I had - client transcripts, competitor sites, the current site - into a few AI tools at once. Got them generating, got them reviewing each other’s output, sat in the middle calling what worked and what didn’t. A couple of hours later I had something I could share confidently with the team. Nobody told me to do it that way. There was no process for it. I went and figured it out.

That’s the skill. We call it Go Figure It Out.

Two words doing two jobs.

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Go - don’t wait, don’t ask, don’t sit on it until you feel ready. The shelf life on “ready” is about a fortnight.
Figure it out - use your brain, not a manual. Try things. Break things. Read the docs when you’re stuck, half the time they’re out of date anyway.

This is quite uncomfortable. It’s the opposite of how most of us learned to work. You were the person who knew the thing. You had the experience, the qualification, the years on the tool. That was your value. Now the tool is six months old and the person sitting next to you, who picked it up last Tuesday, is producing the same output. Sometimes better, because they haven’t yet decided what it can’t do.

Go Figure It Out is the main thing we’re hiring for now. Not “knows X tool.” Not “five years experience in Y.” We want people who, when handed something they’ve never seen, get curious rather than defensive.

The next time you don’t know how to do something, that’s not a problem.

That’s the job.

Love,

Stef

Not any more. There are always at least two relationships now.

1. Yours to the customer.

2. The AI’s to your customer. The advisor.

The first is the one you’ve been managing. The second is the one that’s actually deciding things, in private chats, at 11pm, with an openness the customer reserves for someone they trust.

And the customer trusts the advisor more than they trust you.

GEO is not just SEO 2.0

Most of the writing calls this GEO. SEO with a new acronym. That framing keeps the conversation stuck on tactics when the change underneath is much deeper.

SEO was a ranking problem. Ten options on a page. The decision still belonged to the customer. They scanned, compared, clicked, chose.

GEO isn’t that. There’s no list. There’s a recommendation, often a single one, delivered after a deep conversation the customer is already trusting. They don’t pick between ten. They get an answer.

In SEO, the engine surfaced options and the customer chose. In GEO, the model has chosen, and the customer is mostly checking whether to disagree.

SEO competed for placement. GEO competes for being the answer. There’s usually no second place inside a recommendation.

It’s not one AI. It’s a generation raised on the same books.

ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity. Different companies, different personalities. Each its own neural network.

All trained on roughly the same public information. The same New York Times. The same Reddit. The same Wikipedia. The same founder blogs. They form similar, though not identical, impressions of who you are.

Like a generation of students taught from the same books. They disagree on details. They agree on the basics.

There’s no single brain to game. There’s a shared pool of knowledge that’s been written, said, and quoted about your brand. Whatever picture builds up in that pool is what every advisor pulls from.

Substance is what gets repeated

Most people reduce this to “have a strong POV”. Already overused.

The harder version: opinions don’t matter on their own. Opinions matter when other people repeat them. Substance isn’t what you believe. It’s what gets quoted back about you when you’re not in the room.

The work isn’t writing one good essay. The work is writing things people pass on.

A founder who writes one excellent essay that nobody shares has produced nothing the model can see. A founder whose one strange phrase gets repeated by customers, picked up by journalists, paraphrased in podcasts, has built something the model remembers.

This is where brand strategy breaks. Brand books, tone of voice docs, messaging matrices - none of these get repeated. They sit on a file and die there.

You become how you sound

If your brand can be summarised as “a fintech company”, “a fintech company” is what the model returns.

Everything else was decoration.

The model isn’t punishing you. It’s just shortening you. And shortening rewards whatever’s specific enough to survive being shortened. Most brands sit at the category description and don’t realise it.

What this changes about the work

Brand used to be a closed loop. You wrote the positioning, designed the identity, ran the campaign, measured the lift.

The loop is now widely open.

A third party reads everything you publish, everything anyone says about you, every podcast, every Reddit thread your customers start. It pulls all of it together into an opinion. That opinion gets delivered, when you’re not there, to the customer who would have been yours.

You can’t manage that opinion the way you used to manage messaging. You can only feed what builds it.

Brand books matter less. Founder presence matters more. Internal alignment matters less. What other people say about you matters now even more. The homepage matters less. What the advisor hears about you everywhere else matters more.

The customer increasingly skips the homepage. They consult the advisor.

So when you build your brand, think about who you’re really speaking to. It’s the new key persona you need to win. Before the customer ever shows up, this third party has already formed a view, and the view is what the customer hears.

That opinion is forming whether you participate or not.

Love
Stef

Eighteen months ago the same build would have cost me £50k with a couple of freelancers. I built it for a few hundred quid. That part of the story is real and worth celebrating.

The rest of it is a disaster.

Two months of meta ads and outreach. One trial. Cancelled within a week.

I’m shutting it down.

Here’s what I’m taking from it.

1. Solving your own problem doesn’t mean a market exists. I built the thing I needed at Pony. That doesn’t translate. We’re not a market of one. Studios operate differently, creatives price differently, freelancers think about scope differently. The fact that it works for us is evidence of nothing.

2. Build costs are collapsing. Acquisition costs are going the other way. This is the part people aren’t talking about enough. AI makes it trivial to ship a product. Everyone can ship now. Which means the feed is saturated, ad auctions are brutal, and every niche has ten competitors you’ve never heard of bidding on the same keywords. The bottleneck moved. It’s not the product anymore. It’s getting anyone to care.

3. Project management is the worst category I could have picked. Asana, Atlassian, ClickUp, Notion, Monday. They push CAC to levels that don’t make sense for a bootstrapped product. Probably don’t make sense for them either given how many are still unprofitable. Competing in their category means paying their prices for attention.

4. Creatives are a brutal audience to sell to. Price sensitive. Not impulsive. Suspicious of tools that promise to fix their process. They’ve been burned by too many SaaS subscriptions already. The purchase cycle is long and the willingness to pay is low.

5. Distribution should come before the product, not after. I built first and thought about getting users second. That’s backwards in 2026. Paid ads are probably dead for bootstrapped SaaS unless you already have an audience warming up the funnel.

So ProjectLink gets shelved. We’ll keep using it at the studio because it genuinely solves our problem. But as a product, it’s done.

Already working on something else and can’t wait to share more soon.

Building is the easy part now. The hard part is everything that comes after.

Love.

Stef

Huel spent a decade positioning itself as an antidote to junk food. That mission ran through every ad, every product page, every founder interview. Customers believed they were buying into something that stood against the broken food system.

Now it belongs to the company behind Actimel.

A year earlier, Unilever acquired Wild for around £230 million. Wild built its brand on eliminating single-use plastic. Its founders talked about sustainability with what looked like genuine conviction. The enemy was faceless corporations pumping out billions of plastic containers.

Turns out Unilever produces more single-use plastic than almost any personal care company on earth. And recently scaled back its own sustainability targets.

This keeps happening. It should have a name by now.

Innocent Drinks spent a decade as the anti-corporate smoothie brand, then sold to Coca-Cola. Green & Black’s, the ethical chocolate, sold to Cadbury and got absorbed by Kraft. The Body Shop sold to L’Oréal. Ben & Jerry’s sold to Unilever in 2000, and 25 years later co-founder Ben Cohen is publicly trying to buy it back because the mission he was promised would be protected has been systematically taken apart.

Every one of these brands was built on the same premise: we’re the alternative. Every one ended up inside the thing they were the alternative to.

The betrayal is structural

Most founders genuinely believe in what they’re building. Conviction is real - you don’t survive years of rejection on cynicism alone.

But to fight giants, you need resources. To get resources, you need investors. And from the moment that first cheque clears, you have two missions: the thing you said you were building, and the financial outcome you’ve implicitly promised to deliver.

Investors have timelines. They expect returns. For a while, both missions coexist - the mission attracts customers, customers drive growth, growth attracts more investment. Then you reach the top metrics. Investors want their return. You can keep growing independently - slow, uncertain. Or you can sell to exactly the kind of company your brand was built against, and deliver a clean, enormous payday for everyone at the table.

The founder doesn’t wake up and decide to betray the mission. The structure they entered was always going to lead here.

The script never changes

Every acquisition announcement reads the same way.

Huel’s statement said the deal lets them “grow faster, reach more people, and keep improving products.” Wild’s co-founder said Unilever’s reach would “accelerate our mission.” Innocent’s founders said Coca-Cola would help them get smoothies “to more people in more places.”

Scale-up. Never sellout. Every time.

I think founders are dishonest with themselves in these moments, not just with the public. And maybe that self-deception is part of the wiring that makes entrepreneurship possible in the first place - the same quality that lets you ignore everyone telling you your idea won’t work is the same quality that lets you rationalise handing your mission to the highest bidder.

The darkest part: Most consumers keep buying

When you buy a Wild deodorant or mix your Huel shake every morning, you’re buying a story about yourself. You’re the person who cares. You’re making the better choice.

Then one morning you find out Unilever owns it. There’s a flash of discomfort. But the habit is already formed. The product is already in your routine. It still feels like the better choice, even though the company behind it is the one you thought you were rejecting.

These brands sell the feeling of change. Old habits replaced with new habits that feel better but sit inside the same system. Moral self-medication. And the medication still works after the acquisition, because the feeling was always the product.

The mission outlives its own authenticity.

The ones who actually meant it

In 2022, Yvon Chouinard transferred his family’s entire ownership of Patagonia, valued at $3 billion, to a purpose trust and a nonprofit. All future profits go to fighting climate change. No payday. He considered selling. He considered an IPO. He concluded both paths would erode everything Patagonia stood for. So he removed the possibility entirely.

Dr. Bronner’s has been family-owned since 1948. No outside investors. The company caps executive pay at five times its lowest-paid employee and donates all profits beyond what it needs to operate. In 2025, it dropped its B Corp certification — not because the company had changed, but because B Lab started certifying Unilever and Nestlé, and Dr. Bronner’s refused to share a label being used for greenwashing.

They walked away from a credential most brands chase because it no longer meant what it was supposed to mean.

Both companies prove the same point: the choice exists. But notice what Patagonia and Dr. Bronner’s have in common. No venture capital. No investors demanding a return. No cap table dictating the ending.

If you take the VC money, you’ve already made the choice. The rest is just timing.

The real question

Turning down a billion-dollar offer requires a kind of conviction almost none of us will ever be tested on.

If your goal is to build a company, make money, and exit - brilliant. Congratulations. That’s a hard thing to pull off and worth celebrating. And I’m all in.

The uncomfortable part is this: being upfront about it would kill the brand before it starts. Nobody rallies behind “I want to build something great and if the right offer comes I’ll probably take it.” Nobody pays a premium for radical commercial honesty.

The system requires the performance of mission to function.

The next time a founder tells you they’re on a mission to change the world, ask one question: who owns your cap table?

The answer will tell you how the story ends.

Gross profit grew 24% year-over-year. Customers up. Profitability improving. Dorsey was blunt: “Our business is strong.” He cut because the company he built for 2021 is not the company he needs for 2027. And he predicted most companies will reach the same conclusion within a year.

Amazon said it needed “fewer layers.” Salesforce quietly cut hundreds. Microsoft replaced its Xbox head with an AI executive. Autodesk’s CEO said revenue per employee is now the defining metric. Block just did what everyone else is thinking about doing but doesn’t have the nerve to announce on an earnings call.

People compare this to the industrial revolution. But that comparison misses the point. The industrial revolution displaced labour but created new roles that still needed people. Factory owners needed floor managers. Railways needed engineers. Telegraphs needed operators. Every wave of disruption created a roughly equal wave of new employment.

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This time, the new roles need fewer people. And the gap widens every quarter. Dorsey said something happened in December with AI models getting an order of magnitude more capable, and it showed a path to applying it to nearly everything they do. When a CEO of a $33 billion company says that out loud on an earnings call, it’s worth taking seriously.

This is also the biggest window of opportunity for established companies in decades

Everyone will have access to similar AI tools. So the edge is not just the technology. The edge is using this moment to rethink what your company actually is. Your structure. Your positioning. How you operate. What you stand for. Not just trim headcount and add “AI-powered” to the website.

The companies with real expertise, real client relationships, operational depth built over years, those are the ones who should be leading right now. They have something startups can’t fake: trust earned over time. But trust attached to an outdated brand becomes a liability. You’re known for what you were, not what you’ve become.

Most companies won’t touch that. They’ll satisfice. Trim enough to feel modern without changing anything fundamental. Restructure the org chart, update the homepage, publish a LinkedIn post about embracing change. And slowly become irrelevant from the inside while watching for threats from the outside.

The hard move is not cutting people. Dorsey proved the market will applaud that. The hard move is looking at the company you’ve built and asking whether your positioning, your narrative, the way you operate, still matches where you’re going. Because if it doesn’t, the restructuring only buys you time. Nothing else.

Go wild or go home

If you want to see what this looks like in practice, we just published the IMSERV case study. One of the UK’s most established energy data companies. 600+ people. Decades of trust. But the market still saw them as a traditional metering provider. We repositioned them from infrastructure to intelligence. From hardware to insight. From service provider to strategic partner.

Worth a read if you’re thinking about any of this.

Love.

Stef

They don’t.

The best decisions happen when someone stops caring enough to think clearly. Stops asking “what will they say?”

Caring is a trap

When you care too muc…

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It feels like a reflex.

I’ve gotten good at it.

Scrolling while my kid tells me about his day, excited to see me after school. While waiting at red lights behind the wheel. In the cinema when everyone else is watching the film. At Xmas dinner, surrounded by family I see twice a year.

I feel ashamed writing this. But I’m grateful.

The obvious costs are easy to name. Disconnection from the people in front of you. Tired eyes. Fractured attention. The guilt that hums underneath everything.

The hidden cost - the moment you accept signal, you stop creating signal.

When your brain operates in constant receiving mode, it thinks it’s creating. But it’s recycling. Remixing the inputs. Reacting to whatever the feed served up that morning.

We say we’re thinking but we’re mostly processing.

They told us - surround yourself with brilliant people and you’ll become brilliant too. Fair enough. But now we surround ourselves with them ten hours a day through screens. Americans spend over 60% of their waking hours consuming content.

At that ratio, how could you possibly know what you actually think?

The world tells you what the standards are. What success looks like. What’s right and wrong. How to build, how to compete, who to measure yourself against. Why to measure. And your beliefs form around those signals - inevitably. You don’t notice it happening because it feels like your own thinking.

But it isn’t.

It’s inherited. Absorbed. Recycled.

And this is why most businesses look the same. Most brands sound the same. Most strategies follow the same playbook. Everyone’s reading the same feeds, absorbing the same frameworks, reacting to the same signals. The output converges because the input is identical.

Real differentiation comes from seeing something others don’t. And you can’t see what others don’t if you’re looking where everyone else is looking.

The breakthroughs - in business, in art, in life - come from people who found a way to stop the signal long enough to hear their own.

I’ve spent years in design. It’s my adult life. My edge. My way of seeing the world.

It’s also my cage.

My brain has been shaped in ways that aren’t easy to change. That shaping gave me something - a kind of force. But the same force that pushes me forward also holds me back. I see every problem through the same lens. I reach for the same tools.

Knowledge can become a golden cage. It makes you efficient at things you should probably question.

The only way I’ve found to escape it - even briefly - is to stop the signal entirely. To sit in silence long enough that my own thoughts have room to surface.

Not the recycled ones. The real ones.

Silence is uncomfortable.

Your brain fights it. It reaches for the boost - anything to avoid being alone with itself.

That discomfort is the point.

On the other side of it is something you can’t get any other way: your own voice, ideas, purpose, goals. Your own judgment. Ideas that didn’t come from someone else’s feed.

AI models are built on other people’s knowledge. They remix. They react. They predict the next word based on patterns they’ve absorbed.

The one thing they can’t do is originate from silence.

You can.

I’m not telling you to delete your apps or move to a cabin. I’m not even telling you to meditate.

But notice.

Notice when you reach for the phone. Notice when the input is filling space that could hold something else - or maybe nothing. Notice what happens when you let yourself be bored.

And when you can, turn the device off. Stare at a wall for five minutes. Feel your heartbeat. Smell the air.

Have a conversation with your younger self - the one who hadn’t absorbed all these signals yet. Ask them what they wanted before they learned what they were supposed to want.

Then see what comes up when no one else is talking.

That’s where the good stuff lives.

Now turn this device off.

2025 is almost gone and I’m not going to lie - it was a strange one. For me. For a lot of people I know. Some had their best year ever. Others got knocked down hard. The ground shifted under all of us whether we wanted it to or not.

I felt it too. That mix of excitement and dread sitting in your chest at the same time. Not knowing if the changes happening around us are opportunities or threats. Probably both.

If you felt any of that this year, I want you to know … you’re not broken. You’re not behind. You’re paying attention. And this is exhausting because everything is moving so fast.

Where I landed

For most of my career, I did what made sense. I optimised. I stuck to what worked. I avoided unnecessary risk. That’s the smart play, right? Find something that works and protect it.

That worked. For a while.

But the world is changing so fast now that playing it safe might be the riskiest thing you can do. The strategies that got us here are expiring. What worked last year already feels outdated. And that pace isn’t slowing down.

At first, this terrified me.

Then something clicked.

When the rules change, everyone starts from zero. The advantages that used to matter - connections, experience, resources - they still help, but they’re not the moat they used to be. The people who’ve been “winning” for years? Many of them are clinging to playbooks that are falling apart. The gatekeepers are losing their grip.

Which means right now, today, is one of the best times in history to try something new.

Not because it’s easy. Because the barriers are lower than they’ve ever been.

My plan for 2026

I’m going to fail as many times as possible.

Not succeed. Fail.

I’m planning to launch multiple new ventures over the next twelve months. Each one gets dedicated resources and a simple rule: validate whether it works within four to five months. If it works, double down. If it doesn’t, kill it and move on.

No ego. No attachment. Just experiments.

Try ten things. Expect nine to fail. Or maybe all. Try to find the one that doesn’t.

In a world moving this fast, waiting for certainty is a trap. You’ll never have enough information. You’ll never feel ready. The window will close while you’re still planning.

Better to launch ugly and learn than to polish forever and miss the moment.

This is so hard for me. I’m a designer. Everything in me wants to make it perfect before anyone sees it. But I have to overcome that. Get comfortable being uncomfortable. Ship the thing that makes me cringe a little. Because the alternative is shipping nothing.

2025 - what worked and what didn’t

I can say this with some confidence because 2025 taught me a lot about what actually matters.

At Pony, we had probably our most intense year ever. We worked with some incredible companies. Rootstock - the OG in the Bitcoin ecosystem. Smartstream - 1200+ people fintech, repositioned for the AI era. IMSERV - 600+ people, helped them move beyond metering into energy intelligence. Radius rebranded, then raised $7M in a Pantera Capital-led round. Fluent rebranded, then raised $8M led by Polychain Capital. Adalfi rebrand to accelerate their global expansion - they’ve now disbursed $200M to 50,000+ borrowers.

We also launched two new things: Uncomparison.com for pure strategy work, and ProjectLink.co - something we’d been using internally that’s now available to everyone.

But it wasn’t all wins.

Q3 was rough.

• Personal stuff meant me and my co-founder had to step back. Life gets cruel. It’s normal. It hit the business too.

• On a separate note - we took some projects we shouldn’t have. A reminder to trust your gut and say no more often than feels comfortable.

• LinkedIn randomly tanked my reach by 10x overnight. A reminder that building on platforms you don’t own is dangerous.

Life happened. Business continued. Both are true. And that’s okay.

On a personal level, I started cycling this year. Now I love cruising London streets with my headphones on. I know, not the safest. But there’s something about moving through the city at speed, with the rhythm of the music playing, not thinking about work. It’s become my thing. Sometimes the smallest changes make the biggest difference.

What I believe now more than ever

The future isn’t giant corporations and billion-dollar startups. It’s small profitable businesses run by smart people who figured out what they’re good at. AI makes this possible. You don’t need a team of fifty anymore.

Human services will become more valuable, not less. When software becomes a commodity - and it will - the humans who can think, judge, and take responsibility become the real differentiator.

You don’t need permission. You don’t need investors. You don’t need a massive audience or a perfect plan.

You need to start.

Strategy matters. Distribution matters. But more than anything, showing up matters. Writing, making, shipping, learning. Every single day. It’s exhausting and exhilarating and it’s the only way forward.

It’s on you

I don’t know which of my bets will pay off next year. Most won’t. If any. But that’s the point.

Somewhere in those failures, there’s something worth finding.

If 2025 left you feeling uncertain about what comes next - good. That means you’re not sleepwalking. You’re awake.

The opportunities have never been bigger. Yes, staying ahead has never been harder. But the answer isn’t to freeze. It’s to move. To try. To sweat. To grind. To hustle.

If you’re reading this, you’re already the kind of person who’s thinking about what’s next instead of hiding from it.

That puts you ahead of most people.

So yes, go fail at something next year. Try the thing. Launch it ugly. See what happens.

But also - find your version of cycling through London with headphones on. The thing that has nothing to do with work. The thing that just makes you feel alive.

You’ll need both.

See you on the other side.

Stef

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, and I’m not sure the conversation around AI and work is getting at the real issue. Everyone’s talking about which jobs will disappear, which skills will matter, how to “stay relevant.” But from where I sit, almost 20 years in creative services, first as a freelancer, then running a studio, the shift feels different than that.

Anything that can be explained, repeated, or templated is now on a path to zero value. Design, writing, code, strategy, all of it is becoming commodity work. Not bad work. Often genuinely good work. Sometimes better than what average humans produce.

The humans who remain will be rare, expensive, and judged much more harshly than before.

So the question becomes: what are the expensive humans actually paid for?

I used to think it was skill. Better taste, more experience, sharper instincts. And those things still matter, but they’re the baseline now. They get you in the room. They don’t keep you there.

The humans who stay valuable, the ones clients pay a premium for, aren’t selling output anymore. They’re selling certainty. They absorb risk so other people can move forward without second-guessing. They make the path clear when everything feels ambiguous.

AI hallucinates. It can convince you of anything with complete confidence. Expensive humans do the opposite. They validate what’s actually true. They’re the ones you trust when you need to know something is real, not just plausible.

And that’s what senior people actually do. Not work harder. Not deliver more. They make clients feel safe.

Most of us in the service business are accidentally training clients to see us as replaceable.

Every time we answer the same question again, re-explain what’s included, re-send a timeline someone already had, chase approvals that are sitting in inboxes, we’re signalling something we don’t mean to signal. We’re saying: the knowledge lives in my head, my inbox, my availability. Without me responding, you’re stuck.

That feels like value in the moment. But it’s actually fragility. It makes the relationship dependent on constant communication instead of shared clarity. And clients can feel the difference, even if they can’t name it.

If expensive humans are paid for certainty, then certainty has to be visible. Not promised. Not implied. Actually visible, at any moment, without asking.

Decisions legible. Progress obvious. Constraints explicit. Something both sides can point to and say: this is real, this is current, this is what we agreed, this is what happens next.

That’s trust infrastructure. And building it is one of the ways to stop being compared to AI and start being the person clients pay to protect them from the chaos AI creates everywhere else.

We stumbled into this about 18 months ago at our studio. The same problem kept costing us: one late approval would trigger a week of delays, shifting every dependent task and eating margins fast. We burnet time and money on PM tools, but they were all built for internal teams. Clients don’t want to learn complex boards or deal with permissions and notifications. They just want to know what’s happening, what’s next, and what they need to do, without logging into anything.

So we started simple. Figma mockups with the key info, shared as a link, updated weekly. It worked better than expected. Fewer questions, faster decisions. So we built it out properly, a Framer microsite with a page for each client. Even better. Calmer relationships, clearer expectations, healthier margins.

So we built ProjectLink, and now it’s open to anyone who wants the same thing. One link per project. Scope, timeline, deliverables, status. No logins, no onboarding, no complexity. Just shared truth that makes you look like the professional who has their shit together.

The service providers who thrive in the next decade won’t be the ones with the best portfolios or the most impressive client lists. They’ll be the ones who stopped spending their energy on logistics and started spending it on the work that actually matters.

We have more tools than ever, more ways to communicate, more automation. And yet so many of us still feel buried in email threads, status updates, and “quick questions” that eat entire afternoons.

The real value is in strategic thinking. Deep decisions. The kind of judgment that requires context, taste, and the willingness to be accountable for outcomes. If you’re spending your best hours on logistics, you’re competing in the wrong category.

Check out ProjectLink and ping me if you want to jump on a call.

Love.
Stef

I went to Prague to disappear. Morning runs, quick food grabs, then back to the room. No meetings, no messages, no one asking me for anything. Just me, my laptop, and the only question that mattered: can I actually build what’s in my head?

The loneliness hit around day five. Hard. Before that, it was pure flow - your brain in that state where time collapses and you look up realising six hours passed. But then the silence gets heavy. You start hearing your own thoughts too clearly. I get why some digital nomads burn out now. Moving constantly, always alone - that takes something from you.

But I got back with months of progress compressed into a week.

What I Learned Locked in That Room

1. Ride the wave or miss the moment

Momentum has a shape. It comes in waves. You feel it arrive - this energy, this clarity, this need to do the thing right now. When that wave hits, drop everything.

This isn’t just about big projects or rare creative breakthroughs. It’s daily. Some mornings you wake up and designing. Some afternoons your brain wants to solve technical problems. Some evenings you’re in the mood to organise and plan. Sometimes you just feel like doing nothing.

I used to fight this. Stick to the schedule. Honour the calendar. Be professional.

Fuck that.

When the wave comes, ride it. The ROI of focused time during a wave is 10x normal work. Your brain is already primed. The resistance is gone. You’re not pushing the boulder uphill - you’re surfing.

I’ve restructured how I operate around this now. When I feel it coming, I clear space. Because that concentrated energy is worth more than a month of grinding through scheduled tasks.

2. The Future Belongs to Software Architects

The builders of the future won’t necessarily write every line of code. But they’ll understand how systems connect. They’ll see what’s possible. They’ll know enough to build.

That’s the skill gap that matters now. Not memorising syntax. Understanding architecture. Knowing how the pieces fit together. Being able to look at a problem and map the solution in your head before a single line gets written.

You don’t necessarily need to be an engineer. But you need to think like one.

3. Custom SaaS is Eating Generic Tools

The next shift isn’t signing up for another subscription. It’s building exactly what you need. Hiring a team for a weekend. Or doing it yourself.

I know I can build half the tools we use now. And I probably will. Might do it in public, actually.

Watch what’s happening - software shops are pivoting to no-code and AI-built rapid solutions as a service. You don’t buy the tool anymore. You describe what you need, and they build it in days. There’s massive potential in this business model.

The era of “best available option” is probably ending. The era of “exactly what I need” is coming.

4. AI turned months into days

Learning has never been easier or cheaper. Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor - these aren’t just tools, they’re unfair advantages. What would have taken me months to figure out alone, I worked through in days.

The barrier to learning anything is gone. The only thing stopping people now is the choice not to start .. which leads me to my next…

6. Laziness is the only excuse left

I don’t want to be harsh, but this is the truth. We’ve all internalised this outdated model - school is where you learn, work is where you apply it, retirement is where you stop.

That world doesn’t exist anymore.

It’s free or almost free to learn anything. The resources are there. The tools are there. The only thing missing is the willingness to do it.

7. The gap between people is widening fast

It’s never been easier to grow. It’s never been easier to fall behind.

The distance between those who embrace building and those who stay comfortable is accelerating. Between understanding how things work and just consuming them. Between creating your own leverage and renting someone else’s.

Scroll through X and watch what’s happening. People are shipping constantly. A normal guy in the middle of nowhere with just a laptop is building products that get thousands of users. It’s insane what’s possible now.

8. Loneliness is the Price of Total Focus

Day five hit different. The silence became heavy. No distractions meant no escape from your own head.

I wonder how digital nomads manage to keep moving, always alone. It’s definitely not for everyone.

But maybe that discomfort was part of the process. The isolation forced me to sit with the hard problems. No one to ask. No way out except through.

The loneliness was the cost. What I built was the return.

9. London Feels Different Now

I’ve been travelling a lot recently - Europe, Middle East earlier this year. And I keep seeing progress everywhere else. New infrastructure, cultural energy, different values emerging.

Then I come back to London and something feels off. Not the city I moved to. Something that wasn’t there before.

Travelling around the US soon. Curious what the mood is going to be there.

I don’t want to be negative about it. Time will show what’s happening. But I feel it differently.

What this all means

That week in Prague was about learning to code. But I learned more than syntax and systems.

I learned that the skills gap I’d been worried about wasn’t as big as I thought. That focus and isolation and obsessive work still create something real. That momentum has a shape, and when you feel it, you drop everything else.

If you’ve been feeling stuck, if you’ve been repeating what you learned five / ten years ago - maybe you need your own Prague week.

Lock yourself away from everything familiar. See what you’re actually capable of. Build the thing you thought required a team.

The wave is here. Are you riding it?

Sorry for the random thoughts. Been a hectic week and day and just wanted to share what’s up.

DM me - would love to hear what you’ve been up to.

I could get my point across, but every sentence was a negotiation. Accent, pause, the right word hunted down mid-thought. At first, I thought fluency would fix everything, that once I spoke like them, I’d become one of them.

In Britain, accent is a form of architecture.

It tells people what school built you, what class furnished you, and whether you own the house or deliver to it. No one says this out loud. It’s in the air, coded into vowels and pauses.

So I started working on my English. But no matter how much I practised, I never managed to sound British.

And then one day, many years ago, it broke…

I was in a meeting, surrounded by a few white senior men in suits, all of them older, all of them watching. They weren’t just questioning my decisions, they were questioning every word, every sound, the way I shaped a sentence. I could feel my throat tightening, my palms sweating under the table. I reached for water just to buy myself three seconds of silence.

Mid-sip, mid-performance, something in me gave up.

I just stopped trying to sound like them. I stopped performing fluency.

I just said what I meant, the way I knew how to say it.

They listened.

I closed the deal - redesigning the experience for one of Britain’s most iconic productions, The Phantom of the Opera.

Without ever sounding British.

The moment I let go, I felt lighter - almost euphoric. I realised I didn’t actually want to belong in that way. I wanted to be heard, not absorbed. I didn’t need to blend, but stand for something.

That shift changed everything. Because I could convince people, sell ideas and lead teams - yet now that quiet voice that once said “You sound different” had turned into something powerful.

Over time, I realised my “accent anxiety” wasn’t linguistic - it was social design. Britain taught me how invisible hierarchies sound.

Every culture has its own typography.

In London, it’s accent.
In the US, it’s confidence.
In Bulgaria, where I’m from, it’s how you look.

Now, when I hear my accent, I don’t hide it - I use it. It’s my watermark - proof that I’ve built a voice rather than inherited one.

The Lesson…

The more you edit yourself to fit someone else’s frequency, the quieter your own signal becomes.

Authenticity is an amazing relief. It’s the moment you stop performing and start transmitting.

So my advise for you is stop sanding down the edges that make you sound like you.

Stop trying to belong to a culture that rewards sameness.

And I’m not talking just about accent any more. It’s about everything.

Belonging isn’t about sounding the same but about making people tune in differently.

I never learned to sound British.

And that’s the best thing I never achieved.

Love,
Stef

The narrative was obvious: conversational AI would kill keyword search. Google needed to pivot immediately or die.

Two years later, here’s what actually happened:

Google went from 400 billion to 600 billion monthly queries. 200 billion!!! ChatGPT grew from 50 million to 800 million. Both winning. Both growing. Not competing splitting the market.

The Realisation That Changed My Mind

I caught myself the other day. Someone asked a question and I said “Google it.” But in my head, I wasn’t thinking about clicking through web pages anymore. I expected to see the answer right there, at the top.

Google changed my expectations without me noticing. They didn’t force a new behaviour - they evolved the one I already had.

And it clicked.

Google wasn’t defending against ChatGPT. They were letting ChatGPT do the hard work of training the market on AI answers, then positioning themselves as the convenient option for their use case.

Two Paths to Category Dominance

The perfect examples of the two fundamental strategies in category design.

1. Category Creation. ChatGPT positioned itself as conversational AI for deep exploration, and others followed their path.

2. Category Defence. When you own the behavior, you evolve it rather than abandon it. Google took search and added AI-powered answers.

(Yes, Google also launched Gemini to compete directly with ChatGPT. But their real win has been the defence strategy - evolving search with AI Overviews, not trying to replace it with a chatbot.)

The mistake most companies make is picking the wrong strategy for their position.

The Pressure Google Faced

ChatGPT became the fastest-growing product ever. Every publication wrote Google’s obituary. The stock price took hits. When over $200 billion in revenue is at stake, the urge to panic-ship something is overwhelming.

But they waited. They let ChatGPT normalise AI-generated answers, train users to trust AI responses, take all the early adoption risk, and prove the concept at scale.

Then they made their move: AI Overviews. Not a separate tool. Not a new behavior. Just enhanced search. That strategic patience when billions are at stake? That’s category defense mastery.

The Psychological Shift

Google rewired our expectations without us realising it.

The behavioural psychology is clever. You perform the same physical action - typing in a search bar. You see the same interface. But your expectation changed from getting a list of links to seeing an immediate answer. That quicker reward means the habit reinforces faster.

They kept the search behaviour intact but upgraded what “search” means in our brains. I hear more and more people saying “Google it” but meaning “see the answer immediately,” not “find relevant websites.”

The phrase stayed the same. The expectation evolved.

Why Both Are Winning

Search didn’t shift to one model. It split into two lanes.

Google owns quick retrieval - what time does Sainsbury’s close, tomorrow’s weather, how to remove a wine stain. Speed and convenience.

ChatGPT owns deep exploration - explain quantum computing, plan my Italy trip, brainstorm startup ideas. Depth and iteration.

When people use ChatGPT Search, queries drop to 4.2 words - Google-length. They’re searching, not chatting. The markets aren’t converging. They’re specialising.

The Two Strategies

If you’re the incumbent → defend by evolving what you own. Your behavioural debt is your moat. Don’t disrupt yourself.

If you’re the challenger → create a new category. Build from zero with no constraints. Let the incumbent keep their users - you want different users.

Google had 5 billion users with 20 years of trained behaviour. They couldn’t retrain everyone. That constraint forced clarity - enhance search, don’t replace it.

ChatGPT had zero users, zero constraints. They could build whatever made sense for conversational exploration.

Neither strategy is better. They’re just different games that different positions demand.

The Lesson

Evolution beats revolution when you own the behaviour. Revolution beats evolution when you don’t.

And often the hardest part isn’t choosing the strategy. It’s having the guts to commit when everyone thinks you’re wrong.

Google resisted the ChatGPT trend. They had strategic patience when the pressure was enormous. That restraint - that refusal to panic - separates category thinking from reactive competition.

Do you own the behaviour in your market? If yes, defend it.

If no, go and create something new. Markets split more often than they shift. Find your lane and commit.

Love,

Stef

I used to fantasise about having a little robot. Someone, something, to talk to. To play with. A delusional poor kid with too much time, too much imagination, and not that many toys .

I forgot about that kid for a long time.

Twenty Years of Pixels

I’ve been a designer for two decades now. I’m ok at it. I love it. Some nights I’ll open Figma for no reason at all, just to move things around, just because it feels right.

But lately there’s been this itch I can’t scratch. Not dissatisfaction exactly. More like I’ve been operating in the same mental room for too long and I need to kick down a wall.

This wall has been pressing me hard.

And then there’s the other thing. The thing designers whisper about but don’t always say clearly: What happens to us when AI gets really, really good?

Learning to Think in a Different Language

So I started learning Python and JavaScript.

Weekends. Late nights. Stealing hours wherever I can find them. Not because I want to become a software engineer (I don’t). But because I believe the real divide in the future won’t be between people who use AI and people who don’t. It’ll be between people who understand how it works and people who just push buttons and type words.

Python is the backbone of AI. JavaScript is how the web thinks. Learning them isn’t about writing production code (though that’s a nice side effect for launching MVPs). It’s about literacy. About being able to look under the hood and actually see what’s happening.

I’ve built some basic workflows on Replit. Nothing impressive. But enough to realise something important - design is about to get a lot more intelligent. Not just taste and aesthetics (though those still matter) but systems thinking. Logic. Understanding how things actually connect and operate.

And taste itself? I think it’s more trainable than many admit, especially with the right models. What’s left after that is pure subjectivity: what moves you versus what moves me. And that’s where the interesting work lives.

Hitting My Head Against the Wall (Again)

It’s frustrating as hell.

Some days I feel like I’m back to being that kid trying to figure out how to make a perfect gradient in Photoshop. One minute something clicks and I think “Oh, I get it now.” The next minute I’m staring at error messages wondering if I’ll ever make anything actually useful.

But here’s the thing: it’s also fun. It gives me something to chase. Something to look forward to.

And I’m starting to recognise that bored kid again. The one who dreamed about a robot friend because he had nothing else. The one who imagined impossible things just because he could.

The Boring Safety of Adulthood

Somewhere along the way, we all became too careful. Too predictable. Too obsessed with making the “right” choices - the ones that look good on paper, the ones society told us make sense.

We optimised for safety and lost the plot.

I’m not saying quit your job and learn Haskell. But I am saying remember who you were before you learned to colour inside the lines. What were you obsessed with? What did you daydream about when no one was watching?

For me, it’s that kid who wanted to build a robot to talk to. Turns out, twenty years later, I’m finally trying to learn how to build some real shit, not only design it.

Love.

Stef

Your life. Your career. Your business.

Yesterday? This morning?

I do it too. I hate it, but I still catch myself.

Comparison sneaks in, makes you look sideways instead of inward. At first it feels like fuel - it pushes you to run faster, to keep up. But then the edges blur.

Everyone starts playing the same game. The game of “best practices.” The game of “what works.” The game of everyone else’s definition of good.

And that game is collapsing.

Industries overcrowded. Playbooks turning to dust overnight. Nothing feels safe anymore. Everyone ships at lightspeed.

Digital consumerism on steroids.

Blue-collar workers, doctors, a few others - maybe safe for now. For everyone else, the noise is only getting louder.

I remember scrolling through yet another round of logo commentary. Designers tearing apart a rebrand on Twitter .. ok sorry - X. Some called it genius. Others called it shit. Hundreds of hot takes in a thread that would be forgotten in a week. Max.

But really? It was just another company logo. Polished. Pretty. Hollow.

And this hit me … for months … the game we’re all playing.

Empty noise dressed up as progress.

I looked at Pony and saw us too - one of many branding agencies. Yes, I believe we do a pretty good job. But we were in the same crowded race. Another deck. Another identity. Another shiny portfolio piece.

That made me stop.

No. No. No.

The silence that followed was uncomfortable. But it forced a realisation: the personal and the professional weren’t separate. They were the same problem. Comparison had seeped into everything. And the only answer was to walk the other way.

Uncomparison began with that refusal. A few blog posts. Some half-formed thoughts.

A need to find a better way for brands … and for us … and selfishly for me.

We started saying “no” more often. No to certain clients. No to old ways of working. The noise got quieter. And eventually, something new came into focus: Uncomparison as a strategy.

Today, inside Pony, Uncomparison is a 4–6 week strategy sprint.

Pure strategy. No visuals. No moodboards. No fluff.

Just one goal: What is the one thing that makes you uncopyable?

And for anyone out there … underneath all the layers and noise, it’s always there.

Your refusal. Your edge. The thing you’ve felt but never named.

The part of you that doesn’t play the game - and never has. That’s what we dig for.

That’s what becomes your direction. Because once you find that, you don’t need to shout louder. You just need to be undeniably you.

You’ve seen it too. The sameness. The chatter. The race. Companies scaling before they stand for anything. Optimising what’s easy to measure. Building things to be seen, not believed.

Growth for growth’s sake.

Most brands don’t die - they get diluted.

Same with people. But hey - brands are all built by people, right!

We run this sprint with a small number of companies - founders and leadership teams who are tired of playing the same game.

It’s not design. It’s not campaigns. It’s strategy.

The work of stripping away noise.

Uncovering what makes a brand uncopyable.

Then building from that place. Sometimes mixed with category design. Often not.

Because you can copy features.

Copy playbooks.

Copy tactics.

But you can’t copy conviction.

The real moat for most isn’t tech, it’s truth.

Not polish, but purpose.

Not optimisation, but refusal.

If this resonates, start here → a short set of principles - defining the idea, the practice, and where it’s going - uncomparison.com

Message me. I want to hear from you.

Stef

✌️

When the noise stopped, my mind finally cleared. I realised how often I’ve been living on autopilot - always rushing to the next thing, rarely present in the one right in front of me. Time away reminded me how important it is to pause, to stay quiet, and to ask: Why did I start what I started? Am I still aligned with who I am today - or just following the momentum of who I was ten years ago?

Here are some of the shifts that surfaced:

• I’ve been absent. Not physically, but mentally. Always living in the future, rarely here. That hurt. In the short term it hurts my closest family and friends. In the long term it hurts me.

• A recent DNA test reminded me: my time might be shorter than I think. That alone compelled me to re-prioritise health.

• I’m turning 40 soon. Another reminder: health isn’t optional. It’s the lever that makes every other lever possible.

• Success depends on time. More healthy years = more unfair advantage = more leverage. So I’m treating health like a startup and doubling down - the engine behind everything else.

• Alcohol has to go. No more pints after work, no more shots when going out. The cravings aren’t the issue - it’s the social side. I still don’t know how to navigate that. If you’ve cracked this, email me. I want to hear from you.

• Sugar and processed food: cut. Boring to write about, but transformative to live. Except for my favourite chocolate cake at Jade in Blackheath, London.

• AI as an ally. I’ve been feeding GPT 5 my health data and book notes - even whole books. Training it on my body, my brain, and my plans. The power is wild when you point it at the right data. It’s already helping me design systems for body health, mind health, and business.

• Play is back. I’ve been designing for almost 20 years. The rules change, but the feeling evolves - shifting shape yet staying familiar. Recently I started building small apps with Cursor, Claude and Replit. It reminded me how much I love to experiment and learn - the priceless feeling of creating something for its own sake. No budgets, no timelines, no margins. Just play. I’ll be launching a few new side projects soon.

No clean conclusion. Just a messy set of shifts I don’t want to lose - and that I wanted to share with you.

If you’ve gone through something similar - cutting alcohol, reshaping health, or rethinking how you spend your time - I’d love to hear your story. Email me.

PS: I’ve been quietly building something new that I’m super excited about. I’ll share more soon.

We'd just presented a brand direction with real bite. Confident. Bold. A little dangerous. The founder said: "This is the one."

Then a few days passed.

"Hey, just some thoughts from the wider team…"

That's how it begins.

"Can we tone the voice down a bit?"

"Maybe this colour is too intense?"

"Should we add a safer option, just in case?"

Legal had concerns.

Sales chimed in.

Support said the tone might frustrate customers who expect something more traditional.

The founder, now juggling everyone's opinion, said:

"Let's just tone it down a bit, here's our collated feedback."

Nobody was angry anymore. Everyone was happy.

What started brave became safe.

And that's exactly when it gets dangerous.

This is how strong brands lose their nerve

In the early days of Pony, we saw this pattern in ourselves. Growing fast. Saying yes to almost everything that can pay the bills. It felt like momentum.

But over time, it started to blur who we were. We didn't yet have the nerve to say, "This isn't for us."

Not through one catastrophic decision, but through dozens of small, polite compromises.

People want to protect the brand. Avoid risk. Keep everyone comfortable.

It's human. It's understandable.

But in branding, risk-avoidance is identity suicide.

You don't stand out by keeping the volume low.

Jaguar got so much hate

An icon. The leaping cat. Decades of British legacy.

Gone. ☠️

No more feline grace, just JAGUAR in brutal, all-caps sans-serif.

Designers went nuts.

"The soul is gone." "Feels like a generic tech company." "Did they just murder the brand?"

Jaguar didn't flinch.

Because it wasn't a mistake, it was a statement: We're not who we were.

New lineup. Electric future. Clean break.

Will it work? Time will tell. But they weren't trying to be liked. They were making a bet.

Architecture knows this pain

At first, everyone wants to build something iconic.

A statement.

Like the Sydney Opera House. The Eiffel Tower. The Burj Khalifa. Buildings people once despised- now global landmarks.

But as fear creeps in, the edits pile up:

"What if it's too bold?" "Will people accept it?" "Let's make it more… neutral."

And you end up with a glass box nobody notices.

Safe. Practical. Completely forgettable.

A strong brand turns some people away

When we finally decided to let go of clients who didn't fit, even ones we absolutely loved, it was brutal. No guarantee we'd replace that revenue. Felt like sabotage in the moment.

But the clarity that followed? That's what gave us real shape.

And that's not a flaw - it's the filter.

If everyone "gets it," you probably said nothing worth hearing.

Most founders claim they want to stand out. But when that first wave of criticism hits - when people say it's "too weird," "too much," or "not right" - most panic.

"They didn't like it. Let's pivot. Let's soften it."

That's the fatal mistake. The easy choice.

That early discomfort? That's not a warning - that's proof you're ahead of the curve.

You made them feel something.

And once you start sanding off those corners, it's nearly impossible to get the edge back.

Pick a fight

You don't need to scream.

But you do need to plant a flag. Somewhere distinctly yours.

Say something your competitors are too timid to say. Use words that sound like you, not corporate theater. Choose one perspective over group consensus.

Then hold your ground.

Because early on, the loudest feedback will be negative. Most brands retreat here. Fast.

Start here, not there

Work with your brand partners to define your uncomparable truth.

A belief. A stance. A refusal.

Something that’s not “correct.”Something not everyone agrees with.Something that might lose you a few followers … or customers.

It’s not a messaging pillar. It’s not a tone of voice. It’s the part of your brand that can’t be negotiated - even when the pressure’s on.

It’s the uncomfortable thing you stand for that if executed properly makes everything else hard to copy.

Something your competitors would be scared to say. Something the board might hesitate to approve. Something that makes the safe options look irrelevant.

That’s your edge. That’s your filter. That’s your leverage.

Figure that out first.
🫶

Hell, I didn't even know what design was when I started.

Picture this - I was a broke uni student, desperately scrolling job boards, willing to take anything that paid. Then I spotted it: "Junior Sales Exec at Web Design Agency."

I had zero clue what exactly web design meant. But they were hiring, and I needed money.

So there I was, 20 years old, walking into the dodgiest little web agency you could imagine. Trying to convince business owners they needed a new website.

The pitch was simple:

"Your site looks outdated. We'll make it beautiful."

Their response? Always the same.

"Look, our site isn't amazing, but it works. Making it prettier doesn't really matter for us…"

I was baffled. How did they not get it? These sites looked like they were built in 1995. Surely everyone could see how much better our designs were?

But sale after sale, I kept hitting the same wall. The majority just didn't care.

Meanwhile, I found myself spending more and more time watching the designers. Way more than I should have.

I was fascinated. Watching them take a blank canvas and turn it into something beautiful felt like magic.

Eventually, I moved to another agency. New place, new sales role. Same frustrations. Most still didn't care about design the way I was learning to.

So I decided to figure it out myself. Became a project manager. Taught myself design. Finally started designing commercially.

It felt incredible. I loved the craft. The details. Seeing something come alive on the screen.

But I discovered something that many know but no one talks about - some clients care about design. Most don't.

And that's not actually the problem.

The real problem is how most people (me included, back then) think about this. We get frustrated. We blame “uneducated clients” or “short-sighted stakeholders.” So we retreat into echo chambers, creating pretty things to impress each other.

We do it for our egos, not for real impact.

We chase awards, obsess over pixels, get that dopamine hit when someone likes our work. But we're solving the wrong problem.

I got so tired of it I was ready to burn it all down. I was pissed off. Properly pissed off.

Here I was, spending my days designing apps and websites that looked beautiful, but I couldn't tell you why it really mattered. Tweaking interfaces no one would remember. Creating "experiences" that, deep down, felt empty.

I'd wake up, open my laptop, and think:

"Today I'll make something slightly prettier... so exciting…"

It was meaningless. Soul-crushingly meaningless.

So I said fuck it. I jumped into a totally different business, trying to fix a completely different problem. Anything but this shallow, ego-driven design circus I'd trapped myself in.

The startup? Dog walking. Yep, we tried picking up dog poop at scale... with an app. Wish I was joking.

It failed spectacularly.

But here's what happened - I was both the client and the design lead. I spent countless hours polishing the brand and app. Making sure everything looked beautiful.

And guess what? I still lost.

I was on the losing side. I became exactly the kind of client I used to roll my eyes at. The one chasing pretty, thinking that would be enough.

It wasn't. Because pretty doesn't pay the bills. Pretty doesn't carve out a space no one else can own.

It's not about your personal style, or your taste. You're not an artist. You're a coach.

Your job is to understand the game, figure out the strengths of the team you've got, and pull the right moves to get as close as possible to winning.

Sometimes that means making something beautiful. Other times it means making something harsh, ugly, risky, or polarizing. Whatever it takes to carve out a space nobody else can own. So people feel your brand in a way they'll never feel a competitor.

The rest of it (your creativity, your natural taste, your "style," your base knowledge about what's right and wrong) is just table stakes. The underlying game is about position, strategy, and how you make the brand uncomparable.

Look at Liquid Death. They're not selling hydration. They're selling a middle finger to the wellness industry.

Slack isn't about chatting faster. It's about feeling less busy.

Tesla didn't sell "eco." They sold sexy.

They all picked fights no one else could fight. They made themselves uncomparable.

So what's this really about for any founder, marketer, or team trying to build something that lasts?

Three things:

1. Carve out a position competitors can't take.

2. Tell a story people want to be part of.

3. Create emotional real estate so they remember you.

The companies that get this don't just have design teams making things prettier.

They have strategy teams that happen to think visually.

They know every pixel, every interaction, every message is a choice about who they are. And who they're absolutely not.

So ask yourself:

• What’s your story that no one else can tell?

• What do people feel with you that they don’t feel anywhere else?

And trust me - everyone has their thing.

You just need to dig deep enough to find it.

The lesson: design isn't craft. It's 99% strategy.

Big tech brands spend millions on ads, videos, posts. Everything looks perfect, sounds right, but feels empty. Like they’re trying to be liked by everyone, and end up meaning nothing.

Meanwhile, I stumble on tiny brands with no budget and no polish, but they hit. Hard. A weird local joke. A rough video that feels human. Not trying to please everyone. Just speaking to someone… usually someone like me.

We’re all tired of the same-old, sell-everything, brand-performative nonsense.

Big brands feel numb.

Small ones? Alive.

The Tradeoff Nobody Talks About

Part of it is structure, obviously. Once you’re at a certain size, you’re managing legal, compliance, multiple regions, risk - all the invisible constraints that shape every tweet, visual, and tone of voice. Global consistency becomes the religion. And understandably so. You can’t afford to offend or confuse a market when you’re serving hundreds of millions of users.

But the cost is cultural intimacy.

You lose the messiness, the rawness, the realness that makes something feel like it belongs to you. You end up with clean gradients, neutral copy, slogans about efficiency and productivity. It doesn’t mean anything’s wrong - but also, nothing really feels right.

It just doesn’t feel like anywhere. It floats in this cultureless space - too polished to feel personal, too safe to feel specific. Too normal.

That’s why people connect with micro brands so much more. It’s not about scale. It’s about proximity. About how close a brand feels to your real world.

Connection Needs Specificity

I’ll give you an example.

A few weeks ago, I saw a campaign by a South London chicken shop chain celebrating its 40th anniversary. There was something about it - the way it looked, the people in it, the clothes, the music… that made me pause. It wasn’t just a brand campaign. It was a moment. It was raw. Real. It felt like a love letter to a very specific place, a vibe, a way of living. It felt like home. If you’ve ever walked around South London, you’d get it instantly.

But if you haven’t? It probably wouldn’t mean much. And that’s the point.

Tech brands rarely get that close. They speak in abstractions: speed, innovation, impact, AI. But they rarely say anything that feels rooted in a place, or a real moment in life. They don’t talk like people who live somewhere. They talk like products that could’ve been made anywhere.

And it’s not just an aesthetic problem, it’s an emotional one. Culture is made of small things. Local details. Inside jokes. Specific frustrations. Micro brands thrive in those cracks. Global brands often pave over them.

When Software Becomes Status

Some tech brands do manage to create connection, but it’s a different kind. It’s built around status, not belonging.

You use Superhuman, not because you love the brand, but because you like what it says about you. Sorry, no harsh feelings... I'm sure the product is good too, but that Superhuman signature at the end... Same goes for Notion, Linear etc - these brands use aesthetics, scarcity, or design to create the illusion of a lifestyle.

And to be fair, that’s its own form of culture. But it’s a fragile one. Built more on how it looks than how it feels. On what it signals, not what it says. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that - we all work with the tools and tactics we have. I just wonder if there's more room for depth. For presence. For something beyond the performance.

And when the team behind it changes, or the founder exits, or the hype fades - so does the connection. Because it was never really a relationship. Just a projection. Signalling.

Where Did the Soul Go?

Founders are often the last remaining piece of emotional proximity in tech. When they’re visible, active, tweeting, building in public - you feel like there’s a person behind the brand. Someone with taste. Someone with beliefs. That energy is infectious. They make and kill brands. Dear Elon... such a bad example.

But many of them don’t stay. And honestly, I don’t blame them. Building a company for 10+ years is brutal. Eventually, they want their exit. That’s the startup dream.

But what’s left after that? A product that works. A marketing team trying to maintain the vibe. And a brand that slowly becomes… generic. Not bad, just blank.

The Real Question - Should Software Even Try?

This is where I keep circling back. And I don;t have an answer.

Does software need to mean something emotionally? Most of it already does, at least on the surface. But can it go deeper? Can it move past productivity tropes and start building something culturally grounded, more human, more instant?

I think for a long time, we were okay with function. But after years of remote work, endless tools, and transactional online interactions, something shifted. I’m seeing it in clients who ask for in-person meetings again. In team offsites that feel more like therapy than strategy. In my own desire to feel energy - not just alignment. To get out of the house, no matter how comfortable my setup is.

We’ve all gotten used to efficiency. But we’re craving connection again.

So maybe yes - maybe even software should mean more now. Not every product has to be your best friend. But the ones that go a little deeper, speak a little more honestly, or show up a little more like people … they’re the ones we remember.

What’s Next?

Ironically, the thing that might actually help is the one thing we didn’t expect: the bloody AI we’re all tired of hearing about. Yeah, I know .. I had to end my email with this too...

Because maybe AI will let brands go hyperlocal again - not with big teams or complex ops, but with adaptive messaging, context-aware visuals, and language that shifts based on where you are and how you feel. AI that replicates culture at a hyperlocal level.

Imagine a product that doesn’t just work, but talks to you like it knows where you live. A website with a homepage image taken just three blocks away.

Because in a world where everything looks and works the same, closeness is the only differentiation that still matters.

Am I alone here?

Recently, I decided to sit down and write a list.
Not out of frustration - just to get clear on something: What kind of people do I actually want to work with again?

Time’s too short to waste it on the wrong fits.
And life’s too short to work with assholes. But how do you know if someone’s solid before you’ve actually worked with them?

You don’t always. But there are signals. Small things early on that usually give you a pretty good idea. I used to ignore these. Now I pay close attention.

So here’s what I’ve learned - what separates the ones I’d go back to in a heartbeat from the ones I’d rather not cross paths with again.

1. Kindness > Ego
The sharpest people I’ve met are often the kindest.
No flexing. No power games. Just quiet confidence and respect.
The arrogant ones? Usually overcompensating.
Kindness lingers - it’s what you remember long after the work ends.

2. Contagious hustle
These founders have energy that moves the room.
You leave a call with them thinking: “Yeah. Let’s go.”
They don’t talk about doing the work - they do it. And you want to keep up.

3. True collaboration
They don’t treat you like a service provider. It’s a partnership.
They value your time. They listen. They work with you.
No drama, no ghosting, no tug-of-war over dumb stuff.

4. They go deep
You can tell when someone’s done the work.
They know their space inside-out.
They don’t bluff or wing it. When they talk, you learn.

5. They ship
They’re not waiting for perfect. They’re pushing things live, learning, improving.
They know speed beats perfection and that perfection’s an illusion anyway.

6. Pure focus
They’re not chasing shiny objects or riding trends.
They know exactly what they’re building. And they stay locked in.
Every yes is thoughtful. Every no has purpose.

7. No bias
They don’t care where you’re from, what you sound like, or what box you fit in.
They care about clarity. Good ideas. Clean execution.
That’s it.

8. Solution-focused
They don’t spiral when things get messy.
They adapt. They reframe. They get back to building.
They play the game as it is, not how they wish it was.

9. High-trust operators
They hire people they believe in and let them lead.
No micromanaging. No second-guessing every pixel.
Just trust, accountability, and momentum.

10. Always learning
The best ones? Still learning. Still listening.
Even when they’ve got the money, traction, press - they’re still curious.
That mindset? Rare. And magnetic.

Writing this list was a reminder.
To focus my energy where it counts.
To build with the right people.
To say no more often - and hell yes when it feels right.

Because the older I get, the more I realise:
The people you work with shape everything.
Your energy. Your growth. Your joy.

Choose wisely.

♡

I won’t blame it all on the system, but growing up in post-Soviet Bulgaria in the late 90s, school wasn’t built to inspire. It was all about memorising facts from thick, joyless textbooks and being terrified of strict teachers.

History? Disaster.
Biology? Even worse.

Then we hit one topic: the Human Reproductive System. And something flipped. I did the whole section in the first week. I mastered it. Puberty hit, and I wanted to know it all.

Took the test. Nailed it.

My teacher was stunned - it didn’t match anything else she’d seen from me.
But I wasn’t trying. I was curious. I was just playing.

That was the first time I noticed it - this strange force. The superpower. When something felt like play, I could go further, faster, deeper than I could imagine.

A few years later, I discovered web design. Boy… you couldn’t stop me.

I was obsessed with Dreamweaver and Photoshop, trying to build my first website. Time flew. I’d forget to eat. I wouldn’t drink water all day. I wasn’t learning, I was exploring. I was in the moment for hours.

That changed everything. Even though I was broke as hell, I felt rich. Empowered.

You know that cliche: “Find what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.”
Turns out it’s mostly true. But there’s a better way to say it:

When you operate from curiosity, everything changes. What feels like play to you is work for others. And that’s your edge.

Most people try to win by doing more. More hours. More optimisation. More “best practices.”

But if it’s not aligned with who you are '- you’ll either burn out or slow down. You’ll start copying others. Chasing trends. And eventually, you’ll lose your way.

You’ll compare yourself constantly.
You’ll question every move.
You’ll suppress your creativity because you’re seeking validation.
You stop doing it for you. and start doing it for them.

Maybe you’ll even succeed. But at a cost.

Real leverage doesn’t come just from hustle. It comes from alignment.
From doing the thing that energises you instead of draining you.
And once you're aligned, the hustle feels like play.

Why authenticity beats competition

Play creates effortless consistency. You’ll keep going long after others quit. You iterate more. You’re not copying, you’re exploring. You build intuition. You see patterns others miss. You can’t be cloned. Taste, timing, perspective - they can’t be faked.

And you attract the right people. If it doesn’t work out - it’s not a fit. When you show up as yourself, your tribe finds you.

Naval talked about this in his recent interview with Chris Williamson - that once you find who you truly are, you escape the game entirely. Not because you’re better. But because you’re no longer playing someone else’s game.

And this all applies to businesses - big time.

Most companies in any industry out there sound the same, look the same, and act the same. They’ve replaced authenticity with compliance.

That’s why they compete endlessly on features, pricing, and ads.

But the best brands? They start from within.

They start by building an organisation where people vibe on the same frequency.
And I’m not just talking about Slack updates and team standups - I mean actual alignment.

A shared mission. A shared instinct for what’s right and what’s real.

When everyone is more or less looking in the same direction - not by force, but by resonance you get the kind of culture that builds legendary brands.

TL;DR - 9 reasons to escape competition through authenticity

✺ Play vs Work: The Ultimate Advantage
What feels like play to you is someone else’s chore. That’s why you’ll outlast, outperform, and out-create.

✺ You’re Not Competing on the Same Axis
If you're operating from your zone of genius, you're in a league of your own.

✺ Effortless Consistency > Occasional Brilliance
When it’s fun, you show up more. And consistency beats everything.

✺ Infinite Iteration Without Fatigue
You don’t burn out - you burn bright. That’s your unfair advantage.

✺ Authenticity is Impossible to Clone
Even with the same tools, no one can fake your lens.

✺ Play Sharpens Intuition
You start feeling things others miss.

✺ Energy Management > Time Management
Working in your zone gives you energy. That’s how you stay in the game for years.

✺ Most Competitors Drop Out
When it stops being fun for them and the market goes down, you’re just getting started.

Play isn’t the opposite of work.
It’s the highest form of it.

So find your play.
Build from there and you’ll uncover your superpower.
And if you haven’t found it yet, don’t copy others.
Work to find yours.

- Stef